It was held by wise men of old that adversity was the test of friendship, but as his Excellency the Minister of the United States has observed, per Mr. Biglow, ’They did not know everything down in Judee;’ and among other subjects of which those ancient writers were necessarily ignorant was that of Continental travel. The coming to grief of a friend is unquestionably very inconvenient; as a millionaire of my acquaintance observes (under the influence, as he confidently believes, of benevolent emotion), ’One likes to see one’s friends prosperous;’ but even when they are not so, it requires some effort to follow the dictates of prudence and cast them off. And, after all, the man, even though you may cut him, remains the same; as fit for the purposes of friendship as ever, except for his pecuniary condition. There is no such change in his relation to oneself as Emerson describes in one of his essays; his words I forget, and his works are miles away, but the man he has in his mind has in some way fallen short of expectation declined, perhaps, to lend the philosopher money. ‘Yesterday,’ he says, ’my friend was the illimitable ocean; to-day he is a pond.’ He had come to the end of him. And some friends, as my little child complains as he strokes his black kitten, ‘end so soon.’

There are no circumstances, however, under which friendship comes so often to a violent and sudden death as under the pressure of travel. It is like the fate which the Scientific ascribe to a box sunk in the sea; after a certain depth, which varies according to the strength of the box, the weight of the superincumbent water bursts it up. It is merely a question of how deep or how strong. Our travelling companion remains our friend for a day, for a week, for even a month; but at the month’s end he is our friend no longer. Our relations have probably become what the diplomatists term ‘strained’ long before that date, but a day comes when the tension becomes intolerable; the cable parts and we lose him. Unfortunately, not always, however; there are circumstances such as being on board ship, for example when we thus part without parting company. A long voyage is the most terrible trial to which friendship can be subjected. It is like the old sentence of pressing to death, ’as much as he can bear, and more.’ It is doubtful, for example, whether friendship has ever survived a voyage to Australia. I have sometimes asked a man whether he knew So-and-So, who hails, like himself, from Melbourne, and he has replied, ’We came over in the same ship’ ’Only that, and nothing more,’ as the poet puts it; but his tone has an unmistakable significance, and one perceives at once that the topic had better not be pursued.

A very dear friend of mine once proposed that we should go round the world together; he offered to pay all my expenses, and painted the expedition in rose-colour. But I had the good sense to decline the proposal. I felt I should lose my friend. Even yachting is a very dangerous pastime in this respect, especially when the vessel is becalmed. In that case, like the sea itself, one’s friend soon becomes a pond. Conceive, then, what it must be to go round the world with him! Is it possible, both being human, that we can still love one another when we have got to Japan, for instance? And then we have to come back together! How frightful must be that moment when he tells us the same story he told at starting, and we feel that he has come to the end of his tether, and is going to tell all his stories over again! This is why it so often happens that only one of two friends returns from any long voyage they have undertaken together. What has become of the other? A question that one should never put to the survivor. It is certain that great travellers, and especially those who travel by sea, have a very different code of morals from that which they conform to at home. Human life is not so sacred to them. Perhaps it is in this respect that travel is said to enlarge the mind. That it does not sharpen it, however, whatever it may do for the temper, is tolerably certain. In their habits travellers are singularly conventional. They are compelled, of course, to suffer certain inconveniences, but they endure others, and most serious ones, quite unnecessarily, merely because it is the custom so to do. In crossing the Atlantic, for example, a man of means will submit to be shut up in a close cupboard for ten days with an utter stranger, though by paying double fare he can get a cabin to himself. This arises from no desire for economy, but simply because he does not think for himself; other travellers do the like, and he follows their example. Yet what money could recompense him for occupying for the same time on land a double-bedded room not to say a mere china closet with a man of whom he knows nothing except that he is subject to chronic sickness? A pleasant sort of travelling companion indeed, yet, strange to say, the commonest of all. Where there is a slender purse this terrible state of things (supposing travel under such circumstances to be compatible with pleasure at all, which, for my part, I cannot imagine) is not a matter of choice; but where it can be avoided why is it undergone?

There is nothing that convinces me of the folly of mankind so much as those advertisements we see in the summer months with respect to travelling companions, from volunteers of both sexes: ’Wanted, a travelling companion for a few months on the Continent, etc. The highest references will be required.’ The idea of going with a stranger upon a tour of pleasure must surely originate in Hanwell, and the adventurer may think himself fortunate if it does not end in Broadmoor. References, indeed! Who can answer for a fellow-creature’s temper, patience, unselfishness, during such an ordeal as a protracted tour? No one who has not travelled with him already; and one may be tolerably certain his certificate does not come from that quarter. It is true some people are married to strangers by advertisement; but their companionship, as I am given to understand, does not generally last for months, or anything like it.

Imagine two people, as utterly unknown to one another, except by letter (and ’references’), as the x and y of an equation, meeting for the first time at the railway-station! With what tremors must each regard the other! What a relief it must be to X. to find that Y. is at least a white man; on the other hand, it must rather dash his hopes, if they are set on pedestrianism, to find that his compagnon de voyage has a wooden leg. Yet what are his mere colour and limbs compared with his temperament and disposition? If one did not know the frightful risks one’s fellow-creatures incur every day for little pleasure and less profit, one would certainly say these people must be mad.

But if instead of X. and Y., it is even A. and B., men who have known one another for years, and in every relation but as fellow-travellers, there is risk enough in such a venture. One night, after dinner at the club, they agree with effusion to take their autumn trip together; they are warm with wine and with the remembrance of their college friendship which extended perhaps, when they afterwards come to think about it, a very little way. What days they will have in Switzerland together! What mornings (to see the sunrise) upon mountain-tops! What evenings on Lucerne! What nights in Paris! A. thinks himself fortunate indeed in having secured B.’s society for the next three months a man with such a reputation for conversation; even T., the cynic of the club, has testified to his charm of manner. By-the-bye, what was it exactly T. had said of B.? A. cannot remember it at the moment, but recalls it on the night before they start together. ’B. is a charming fellow, only he has this peculiarity that if there is only one armchair in a room, B. is sure to get it.’

B., on the other hand, congratulates himself on A.’s excessive good sense, which even T. had knowledged. What was it exactly T. had said of A.? He cannot remember it at the moment, but recalls it on the night before they start together. ’A. is such a thoroughly practical fellow; he has committed many follies, and not a few crimes, but he can lay his hand on the place where his heart should be, and honestly aver that he has never given sixpence to anybody.’ Full of misgivings, and with demonstrations of satisfaction that are in themselves suspicious, they meet at the terminus. A. has a little black bag, which contains his all; it frees him from all trouble about luggage, and (especially) from the necessity of paying a porter. He is resolved not to lose a moment, nor spend a sixpence, in a Custom-house. To his horror, he perceives that B., whose one idea is comfort, has a portmanteau specially designed for him (apparently upon the model of Noah’s Ark), and which can scarcely be got into the luggage-van. This article delays them twenty-four hours at every frontier, because the ordinary authorities decline to open it upon the ground that it contains an infernal machine, and have to telegraph to their Government for instructions.

Again, B. is no doubt a charming conversationalist in English; but he does not know one single word of any other language. He requires every observation of their alien fellow-travellers to be translated, and then says ‘Oh!’ discontentedly, or ’It seems to me that foreigners have no ideas.’ And not for one moment can A. get rid of him. If there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother, it is the Travelling Companion who is dependent upon you for interpretation. It is needless to say that under these circumstances the glass of Friendship falls from ‘Set Fair’ to ‘Stormy’ with much rapidity. After A’s fourth quarrel with a waiter about half a franc, B. calls him a ‘mean hound,’ and takes the opportunity of returning to his native land with a French count, who speaks perfect English, and robs him of his watch and chain and the contents of his pocket-book on board the steamer. A. and B. meet one another daily at the club for years afterwards, but without recognition.

Their case, of course, is an extreme one; but that of C. and D. is almost as bad. They are men of prudence, and persuade E. to go with them, as a makeweight. ‘If we should ever disagree,’ they say, ’as to what is to be done which, however, is to the last degree improbable the majority of votes shall carry it’ an arrangement which only delays the inevitable event

’Three little nigger boys went the world to view,
The third was left in Calais, and then there were two.’

They find the makeweight intolerable before they have crossed the Channel, and, having agreed to cut their cable from him, are from that moment never in the same mind about anything else. It is a modern version of the three brigands who stole the Communion plate. C. and D. push E. over the precipice, and C. stabs D. at a supper for which D. has purveyed poisoned wine.

The only way to secure a really eligible travelling companion is to try him first in short swallow-flights, or rather pigeon-flights, from home. Take your bird with you for a few days’ outing near home; then, if he proves pleasant, for a week’s tour in Cornwall; then for ten days in Scotland, where, if you meet with the usual weather, and he still keeps his temper and politeness, you may trust yourself to him anywhere. Out of twenty failures there will, perhaps, be one success. In this manner I have discovered in time, in my dearest and nearest friends, the most undreamt of vices. One man, F., hitherto much respected as a Chancery barrister, has, as it has turned out, been intended by nature for a professional pedestrian. His true calling is to walk ‘laps’ round the Agricultural Hall or at Lillie Bridge, with nothing on to speak of save a handkerchief round his forehead. ’Let us walk’ is his one cry as soon as he becomes a travelling companion. And he is not content to do this when he arrives at any place of interest, but insists upon walking there perhaps along a dusty road, or over turnip-fields. I like walking myself in moderation say a mile out and a mile in; but not, certainly not, twenty miles at a stretch, and at a speed which precludes conversation. This class of travelling companion is very dangerous. If he does not get his walking he becomes malignant. My barrister, at least, being denied the opportunity of drawing out marriage-settlements, conveying land, or otherwise plundering the community, took to practical jokes. Having a suspicion of his pedestrian powers, from the extreme length of his legs, I took G. with us, a man whom I could trust in that respect, and who fancied he had heart complaint. G. and I took our exercise alone together in a fly. One day we took a long drive four miles or more to a well-known bay. The vehicle could not get down to the sea, so we descended on foot, leaving it at the top of the cliff, with the strictest orders to the man not to stir till we came back. When we returned the fly was gone. How we reached our hotel, Heaven knows! but we did arrive there, in the last stage of exhaustion. The driver of the carriage, whom we met next day, informed us that a gentleman had been thrown from his horse on the cliff-top and had broken his leg, and that, under the circumstances, he had ventured to disobey our instructions and take the poor fellow home. Years afterwards I discovered that nothing of the kind had happened, but that the fiendish F. had given the driver a sovereign to play that trick upon us. F. is a judge now, and has been lately trying election cases. I wonder what he thinks of himself when he rebukes offenders for the heinous crime of bribery!

Again, I always thought H. a pleasant fellow till we went together to Cornwall. He had gone through the first ordeal of a few days nearer home to my satisfaction, but at Penzance he broke out. He was so dreadfully particular about his food that nothing satisfied him not even pilchards three times a day; and the way he went on at the waiters is not to be described by a decent pen. The attendant at Penzance was not, I am bound to say, a good waiter. He said, though he habitually put his thumb in every dish, he ‘hadn’t quite got his hand in,’ and was not used to the business.’ ‘Used! you know nothing about it!’ exclaimed H., viciously. Then the poor fellow burst into tears. ’Pray be patient with me, good gentlemen,’ he murmured. ’I do my best; but until last Wednesday as ever was I was a pork-butcher.’ One cannot stand a travelling companion who makes the waiters cry.

The worst kind of fellow-traveller is one who, to use his own scientific phrase for his complaint, suffers from ’disorganisation of the nervous centres.’ At home his little weaknesses do not strike you. You may not be on the spot when he flies across Piccadilly Circus, pursued, as he fancies, by a Brompton omnibus which has not yet reached St. James’s Church, and is moving at a snail’s pace; you may not have been with him on that occasion when, in his eagerness to be in time for the ‘Flying Dutchman,’ he arrives at Paddington an hour before it starts, and is put into the parliamentary train which is shunted at Slough to let the ‘Dutchman’ pass; but when you come to travel with him you know what ‘nerves’ are to your cost. On the other hand, this is the easiest kind of travelling companion to get rid of; for you have only to feign a sore throat, with feverish symptoms, and off he flies on the wings of terror, leaving you, as he thinks if he has a thought except for his nervous centres to the tender mercies of a foreign doctor, to hireling nurses, and to a grave in the strangers’ cemetery.