Author(s): Elizabeth Von Arnim

Fiction

Excerpt from the opening lines: Every one who has been to school and still remembers what he was taught there, knows that R gen is the biggest island Germany possesses, and that it lies in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Pomerania. Round this island I wished to walk this summer, but no one would walk with me. It is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside. If you drive you are bound by a variety of considerations, eight of the most important being the horses' legs. If you bicycle-but who that loves to get close to nature would bicycle? And as for motors, the object of a journey like mine was not the getting to a place but the going there. Successively did I invite the most likely of my women friends, numbering at least a dozen, to walk with me.