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OU may remember that one of the first things Homer thought worth recording of Odysseus was that "he had seen the towns and knew the minds of many men." When the poet, moreover, characterizes his hero as resourceful, ingenious, a man of many wiles, the inference is plain that this same resourcefulness came of his having knocked about in many strange corners of the earth.

Thus Homer long ago put on record his belief in travel as an essential part of a liberal education.

In later, modern times we have so marvelously improved our facilities for doing all sorts of things, traveling included, that the means often bid fair to overshadow the end. The very fact that we have made our getting about the world so much easier, swifter, safer, has cost us much of that intimate personal contact which must always be the truest delight and most enduring value of travel.

Not long ago, in reading over some family papers, I chanced upon a letter describing a journey from Detroit to New York when railways were not and the Erie Canal was a greater marvel than is Panama to-day. Α tempestuous voyage in a sailing vessel down Lake Erie to Buffalo; lazy days on the canal packet, gliding through the fertile fields and newly built villages of central New York; the embarkation, not without some misgivings, on the new-fangled steamboat at Albany-a twelve days' trip, full of personal adventure and novel experience, all described with that intimate touch that makes one vividly see the journey exactly as it was eighty-odd years ago.

If my business were to take me to Detroit to-night, I fear I should not be able to leave so interesting an account for future generations. Something like this it would have to read:

"Took the Luxury Limited for Detroit tonight. After an excellent dinner smoked and read the evening papers in the buffet car. Retired to a most comfortable bed and slept soundly all night to awake at my destination."

By your leave, I should prefer the adventure of that twelve-day trip! A plague upon these seven-league boots of modern science and invention, for they are fast treading all the romance out of travel.

Yet it is scarcely fair to these same inventions thus to bulk them under one anathema; for the very latest of them bid fair to restore to our Wanderlust all of the glamour their predecessors took away. The same science that robbed us of the stage coach and the white-winged ships of old has given us the aeroplane and the motor car.

The aeroplane, perhaps, must always remain a flight above the ambitions of the average man who sets a value on his neck and likes to feel the solid earth beneath his shoe-leather. But surely next to flying there is no sensation to compare with the glorious vagabondage of the open road and the skimming motor car. And how few of the fortunate owners have learned to use their cars aright! How many to whom the automobile is little better than a sort of private street car, a convenience to take them to and from their places of business, downtown shopping, a stolid whirl about the parks, and to the theater, perhaps, of an evening! Have they never even guessed that they own a veritable Aladdin's carpet, an open sesame to wide countrysides, strange roadways, and the wonderland of all outdoors?

A great convenience, almost a necessity in and about our cities, the automobile has very naturally become within the past few years. But in a sense its best, if not its most important, use can never be merely as a convenience. The man who gets the best out of his motor car is winning through it a liberal education in the university of the open spaces and the open air.

Curiously enough, the man most likely to get the best out of motoring in this way is the average owner of moderate means who drives and cares for his own car. Though his leisure may be limited to Sundays and holidays and his means scant for extended trips, he it is with family and friends that crowds the motor highways each week-end,