The Innocents Abroad quotes

I was provided with a receipt and duly and officially accepted as an excursionist.

There was happiness in that but it was tame compared to the novelty of being “select.”

This supplementary program also instructed the excursionists to provide themselves with light musical instruments for amusement in the ship, with saddles for Syrian travel, green spectacles and umbrellas, veils for Egypt, and substantial clothing to use in rough pilgrimizing in the Holy Land.

Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was to have accompanied the expedition, but urgent duties obliged him to give up the idea.

There were other passengers who could have been spared better and would have been spared more willingly.

Lieutenant General Sherman was to have been of the party also, but the Indian war compelled his presence on the plains. A popular actress had entered her name on the ship’s books, but something interfered and she couldn’t go.

I had schooled myself to expect an imposing array of military and naval heroes and to have to set that back seat still further back in consequence of it maybe; but I state frankly that I was all unprepared for this crusher.

I fell under that titular avalanche a torn and blighted thing.

I said that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I supposed he must—but that to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary to send a dignitary of that tonnage across the ocean, it would be in better taste, and …

It had two berths in it, a dismal deadlight, a sink with a washbowl in it, and a long, sumptuously cushioned locker, which was to do service as a sofa—partly—and partly as a hiding place for our things.

Notwithstanding all this furniture, there was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat in, at least with entire security to the cat.

However, the room was large, for a ship’s stateroom, and was in every way satisfactory.

On deep five fathoms, and anchored fast to the bottom. And out in the solemn rain, at that.

This was pleasuring with a vengeance.

It was an appropriate relief when the gong sounded for prayer meeting. The first Saturday night of any other pleasure excursion might have been devoted to whist and dancing;

but I submit it to the unprejudiced mind if it would have been in good taste for us to engage in such frivolities, considering what we had gone through and the frame of mind we were in.

We would have shone at a wake, but not at anything more festive.

However, there is always a cheering influence about the sea;

By some happy fortune I was not seasick.—That was a thing to be proud of. I had not always escaped before.

If there is one thing in the world that will make a man peculiarly and insufferably self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick.

Soon a venerable fossil, shawled to the chin and bandaged like a mummy, appeared at the door of the after deck-house, and the next lurch of the ship shot him into my arms. I said:

I knew what was the matter with them. They were seasick. And I was glad of it.

We all like to see people seasick when we are not, ourselves.

Playing whist by the cabin lamps when it is storming outside is pleasant; walking the quarterdeck in the moonlight is pleasant; smoking in the breezy foretop is pleasant when one is not afraid to go up there;

I went below—meditating and a little downhearted.

I thought, if five cooks can spoil a broth, what may not five captains do with a pleasure excursion.

… long dining tables on either side of the saloon, and scattered from one end to the other of the latter, some twenty or thirty gentlemen and ladies sat them down under the swaying lamps and for two or three hours wrote diligently in their journals.

Alas! that journals so voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as most of them did!

I doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host but can show a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the first twenty days’ voyaging in the Quaker City, and I am morally certain that not ten of the party can show twenty …

His experience was only the experience of the majority of that industrious night school in the cabin.

If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to keep a journal a year.

A good many expedients were resorted to to keep the excursionists amused and satisfied. A club was formed, of all the passengers, which met in the writing school after prayers and read aloud about the countries we were approaching and discussed the information so obtained.

An attempt was made to organize a debating club, but it was a failure.

There was no oratorical talent in the ship.

We all enjoyed ourselves—I think I can safely say that, but it was in a rather quiet way. We very, very seldom played the piano;

We got plenty of fresh oranges, lemons, figs, apricots, etc., in these Azores, of course. But I will desist.

I am not here to write Patent Office reports.

We are on our way to Gibraltar, and shall reach there five or six days out from the Azores.

The other, the great Rock of Gibraltar, was yet to come. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world.

The information the ancients didn’t have was very voluminous.

Even the prophets wrote book after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must have known it was there, I should think.

… six or seven had sufficient decision of character to make up their minds to go, and did go, and I felt a sense of relief at once—it was forever too late now and I could make up my mind at my leisure not to go.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

But behold how annoyances repeat themselves. We had no sooner gotten rid of the Spain distress than the Gibraltar guides started another—a tiresome repetition of a legend that had nothing very astonishing about it, even in the first place:

but they said no, he had nothing to do but hold the place, and he was competent to do that, had done it two years already. That was evidence which one could not well refute.

There is nothing like reputation.

Every now and then my glove purchase in Gibraltar last night intrudes itself upon me.

“This one does very well; it fits elegantly. I like a glove that fits. No, never mind, ma’am, never mind; I’ll put the other on in the street. It is warm here.”

It was warm. It was the warmest place I ever was in.

I paid the bill, and as I passed out with a fascinating bow I thought I detected a light in the woman’s eye that was gently ironical;

But they had bought gloves, too, as I did. We threw all the purchases away together this morning. They were coarse, unsubstantial, freckled all over with broad yellow splotches, and could neither stand wear nor public exhibition.

We had entertained an angel unawares, but we did not take her in. She did that for us.

Tangier! A tribe of stalwart Moors are wading into the sea to carry us ashore on their backs from the small boats.

They let me alone then for the time being.

We always let each other alone in time to prevent ill feeling from spoiling a joke.

But they had bought gloves, too, as I did. We threw all the purchases away together this morning. They were coarse, unsubstantial, freckled all over with broad yellow splotches, and could neither stand wear nor public exhibition.

They have literally nothing whatever to talk about. The arrival of an American man-of-war is a godsend to them. “O Solitude, where are the charms which sages have seen in thy face?” It is the completest exile that I can conceive of.

I would seriously recommend to the government of the United States that when a man commits a crime so heinous that the law provides no adequate punishment for it, they make him Consul General to Tangier.

I am glad to have seen Tangier—the second-oldest town in the world. But I am ready to bid it goodbye, I believe.

I thought that hinted at lonesomeness. The idea was correct. His is the only American family in Tangier. There are many foreign consuls in this place, but much visiting is not indulged in.

Tangier is clear out of the world, and what is the use of visiting when people have nothing on earth to talk about?

There is none. So each consul’s family stays at home chiefly and amuses itself as best it can. Tangier is full of interest for one day, but after that it is a weary prison.

Tangier is clear out of the world, and what is the use of visiting when people have nothing on earth to talk about? There is none. So each consul’s family stays at home chiefly and amuses itself as best it can.

Tangier is full of interest for one day, but after that it is a weary prison.

The Consul General has been here five years, and has got enough of it to do him for a century, and is going home shortly.

and when victory hung wavering in the scale, George returned with his dreadful wild-goose stop turned on and the choir won, of course. A minister pronounced the benediction, and the patriotic little gathering disbanded.

The Fourth of July was safe, as far as the Mediterranean was concerned.

At dinner in the evening, a well-written original poem was recited with spirit by one of the ship’s captains, and thirteen regular toasts were washed down with several baskets of champagne. The speeches were bad—execrable almost without exception. In fact, without any exception but one.

we had no disposition to examine carefully into anything at all—we only wanted to glance and go—to move, keep moving! The spirit of the country was upon us. We sat down, finally, at a late hour, in the great Casino, and called for unstinted champagne.

It is so easy to be bloated aristocrats where it costs nothing of consequence!

There were about five hundred people in that dazzling place, I suppose, though the walls being papered entirely with mirrors, so to speak, one could not really tell but that there were a hundred thousand.

And it is a pleasant land. No word describes it so felicitously as that one.

They say there is no word for “home” in the French language. Well, considering that they have the article itself in such an attractive aspect, they ought to manage to get along without the word.

Let us not waste too much pity on “homeless” France. I have observed that Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or other. I am not surprised at it now.

We asked him to sit down and eat with us. He begged, with many a bow, to be excused. It was not proper, he said; he would sit at another table. We ordered him peremptorily to sit down with us.

Here endeth the first lesson. It was a mistake.

As long as we had that fellow after that, he was always hungry; he was always thirsty. He came early; he stayed late; he could not pass a restaurant; he looked with a lecherous eye upon every wine shop.

No country offers greater security to life and property than France, and one has all the freedom he wants, but no license—no license to interfere with anybody or make anyone uncomfortable.

As for the Sultan, one could set a trap anywhere and catch a dozen abler men in a night.

The bands struck up, and the brilliant adventurer, Napoleon III, the genius of Energy, Persistence, Enterprise; and the feeble Abdul-Aziz, the genius of Ignorance, Bigotry, and Indolence, prepared for the Forward-March!

… Napoleons, the christening of the young prince that lords it over a regiment of servants in the Tuileries today—and they may possibly continue to stand there until they see the Napoleon dynasty swept away and the banners of a great republic floating above its ruins.

I wish these old parties could speak. They could tell a tale worth the listening to.

They say that a pagan temple stood where Notre Dame now stands, in the old Roman days, eighteen or twenty centuries ago—remains of it are still preserved in Paris; and that a Christian church took its place about AD 300;

We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We had heard of it before.

It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are.

We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a moment; it was like the pictures.

One portion of this noble old edifice is suggestive of the quaint fashions of ancient times. It was built by Jean Sans-Peur, Duke of Burgundy, to set his conscience at rest—he had assassinated the Duke of Orleans.

Alas! Those good old times are gone when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his troubles to sleep simply by getting out his bricks and mortar and building an addition to a church.

The portals of the great western front are bisected by square pillars.

We took a walk, but my spirits were very, very sadly dampened. I did not feel right comfortable for some time afterward.

Why will people be so stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten thousand persons?

But Blondin came out shortly. He appeared on a stretched cable, far away above the sea of tossing hats and handkerchiefs, and in the glare of the hundreds of rockets that whizzed heavenward by him he looked like a wee insect.

… about it than any jig I ever saw before, and then, drawing her clothes still higher, she advanced gaily to the center and launched a vicious kick full at her vis-à-vis that must infallibly have removed his nose if he had been seven feet high.

It was a mercy he was only six.

That is the cancan. The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can, no matter which sex you belong to.

It was in this park that that fellow with an unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian Czar’s life last spring with a pistol. The bullet struck a tree. Ferguson showed us the place.

Now in America that interesting tree would be chopped down or forgotten within the next five years, but it will be treasured here.

The guides will point it out to visitors for the next eight hundred years, and when it decays and falls down they will put up another there and go on with the same old story just the same.

Heloise was born seven hundred and sixty-six years ago. She may have had parents. There is no telling. She lived with her uncle Fulbert, a canon of the cathedral of Paris.

I do not know what a canon of a cathedral is, but that is what he was.

He was nothing more than a sort of a mountain howitzer, likely, because they had no heavy artillery in those days. Suffice it, then, that Heloise lived with her uncle the howitzer and was happy.

… which blighted youths and maidens offer to her memory, but I am sorry enough that I have not time and opportunity to write four or five volumes of my opinion of her friend the founder of the Parachute, or the Paraclete, or whatever it was.

The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my ignorance!

I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled to any tearful attentions or not. I wish I had my immortelles back, now, and that bunch of radishes.

The tons of sentiment I have wasted on that unprincipled humbug in my ignorance! I shall throttle down my emotions hereafter, about this sort of people, until I have read them up and know whether they are entitled to any tearful attentions or not.

I wish I had my immortelles back, now, and that bunch of radishes.

In Paris we often saw in shop windows the sign “English Spoken Here,” just as one sees in the windows at home the sign “Ici on parle francaise.”

Imagine a poor Frenchman ignorantly intruding upon a public rostrum sacred to some sixpenny dignitary in America. The police would scare him to death first with a storm of their elegant blasphemy, and then pull him to pieces getting him away from there.

We are measurably superior to the French in some things, but they are immeasurably our betters in others.

Enough of Paris for the present. We have done our whole duty by it.

Aroint thee, wench! I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than formerly I envied him.

Thus topples to earth another idol of my infancy.

We have seen everything, and tomorrow we go to Versailles.

It was more than human nature could bear. The executive officer ordered our men ashore—with instructions not to fight. They charged the British and gained a brilliant victory. I probably would not have mentioned this war had it ended differently.

But I travel to learn, and I still remember that they picture no French defeats in the battle-galleries of Versailles.

It was like home to us to step on board the comfortable ship again and smoke and lounge about her breezy decks. And yet it was not altogether like home, either, because so many members of the family were away.

I had rather not go any further. There may be prettier women in Europe, but I doubt it. The population of Genoa is 120,000; two-thirds of these are women, I think, and at least two-thirds of the women are beautiful.

They are as dressy and as tasteful and as graceful as they could possibly be without being angels.

However, angels are not very dressy, I believe. At least the angels in pictures are not—they wear nothing but wings. But these Genoese women do look so charming.

The bands played, and so did the fountains; the moon and the gas lamps lit up the scene, and altogether it was a brilliant and an animated picture. I scanned every female face that passed, and it seemed to me that all were handsome.

I never saw such a freshet of loveliness before.

I did not see how a man of only ordinary decision of character could marry here, because before he could get his mind made up he would fall in love with somebody else.

the moon and the gas lamps lit up the scene, and altogether it was a brilliant and an animated picture. I scanned every female face that passed, and it seemed to me that all were handsome. I never saw such a freshet of loveliness before.

I did not see how a man of only ordinary decision of character could marry here, because before he could get his mind made up he would fall in love with somebody else.

Never smoke any Italian tobacco. Never do it on any account. It makes me shudder to think what it must be made of. You cannot throw an old cigar “stub” down anywhere, but some vagabond will pounce upon it on the instant.

I never saw such a freshet of loveliness before. I did not see how a man of only ordinary decision of character could marry here, because before he could get his mind made up he would fall in love with somebody else.

Never smoke any Italian tobacco. Never do it on any account.

It makes me shudder to think what it must be made of. You cannot throw an old cigar “stub” down anywhere, but some vagabond will pounce upon it on the instant.

I like to smoke a good deal, but it wounds my sensibilities to see one of these stub-hunters watching me out of the corners of his hungry eyes and calculating how long my cigar will be likely to last.

It reminded me too painfully of that San Francisco undertaker who used to go to sickbeds with his watch in his hand and time the corpse.

One of these stub-hunters followed us all over the park last night, and we never had a smoke that was worth anything. We were always moved to appease him with the stub before the cigar was half gone, because he looked so viciously anxious.

“The Superb” and the “City of Palaces” are names which Genoa has held for centuries. She is full of palaces, certainly, and the palaces are sumptuous inside, but they are very rusty without and make no pretensions to architectural magnificence.

“Genoa the Superb” would be a felicitous title if it referred to the women.

We have visited several of the palaces—immense thick-walled piles, with great stone staircases, tesselated marble pavements on the floors, (sometimes they make a mosaic work, of intricate designs, wrought in pebbles or little fragments of marble laid in cement), and grand salons hung with pictures …

… the list of the salon he was in, and then stood stiff and stark and unsmiling in his petrified livery till we were ready to move on to the next chamber, whereupon he marched sadly ahead and took up another malignantly respectful position as before.

I wasted so much time praying that the roof would fall in on these dispiriting flunkies that I had but little left to bestow upon palace and pictures.

And besides, as in Paris, we had a guide. Perdition catch all the guides.

Perdition catch all the guides. This one said he was the most gifted linguist in Genoa, as far as English was concerned, and that only two persons in the city beside himself could talk the language at all.

He showed us the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, and after we had reflected in silent awe before it for fifteen minutes, he said it was not the birthplace of Columbus, but of Columbus’ grandmother!

When we demanded an explanation of his conduct he only shrugged his shoulders and answered in barbarous Italian. I shall speak further of this guide in a future chapter.

And besides, as in Paris, we had a guide.

Perdition catch all the guides.

This one said he was the most gifted linguist in Genoa, as far as English was concerned, and that only two persons in the city beside himself could talk the language at all.

Every now and then one comes across a friar of orders gray, with shaven head, long, coarse robe, rope girdle and beads, and with feet cased in sandals or entirely bare.

These worthies suffer in the flesh and do penance all their lives, I suppose, but they look like consummate famine-breeders.

They are all fat and serene.

We did not desire to disbelieve these statements, and yet we could not feel certain that they were correct—partly because we could have broken that chain, and so could St. John, and partly because we had seen St. John’s ashes before, in another church.

We could not bring ourselves to think St. John had two sets of ashes.

They also showed us a portrait of the Madonna which was painted by St. Luke, and it did not look half as old and smoky as some of the pictures by Rubens.

They also showed us a portrait of the Madonna which was painted by St. Luke, and it did not look half as old and smoky as some of the pictures by Rubens.

We could not help admiring the Apostle’s modesty in never once mentioning in his writings that he could paint.

But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together.

But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together.

I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails.

Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one also in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St.

I could say that the Church of the Annunciation is a wilderness of beautiful columns, of statues, gilded moldings, and pictures almost countless, but that would give no one an entirely perfect idea of the thing, and so where is the use?

One family built the whole edifice, and have got money left. There is where the mystery lies.

We had an idea at first that only a mint could have survived the expense.

… that these are actually streets, and the frowning, dingy, monstrous houses dwellings, till you see one of these beautiful, prettily dressed women emerge from them—see her emerge from a dark, dreary-looking den that looks dungeon all over, from the ground away halfway up to heaven.

And then you wonder that such a charming moth could come from such a forbidding shell as that.

The streets are wisely made narrow and the houses heavy and thick and stony, in order that the people may be cool in this roasting climate. And they are cool, and stay so.

Leave your eyes unfettered by your will but a single instant and they will surely turn to seek it. It is the first thing you look for when you rise in the morning, and the last your lingering gaze rests upon at night.

Surely it must be the princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived.

At nine o’clock in the morning we went and stood before this marble colossus.

I shall dream that it is stretched between the sheets with me and touching me with its exposed muscles and its stringy cold legs.

It is hard to forget repulsive things.

I remember yet how I ran off from school once, when I was a boy, and then, pretty late at night, concluded to climb into the window of my father’s office and sleep on a lounge, because I had a delicacy about going home and …

I went away from there. I do not say that I went away in any sort of a hurry, but I simply went—that is sufficient. I went out at the window, and I carried the sash along with me.

I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.

—I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.

I did not need the sash, but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it, and so I took it.—I was not scared, but I was considerably agitated.

When I reached home, they whipped me, but I enjoyed it. It seemed perfectly delightful.

That man had been stabbed near the office that afternoon, and they carried him in there to doctor him, but he only lived an hour. I have slept in the same room with him often since then—in my dreams.

Over this dreadful face, its dust and decay and its mocking grin, hung a crown sown thick with flashing brilliants; and upon the breast lay crosses and croziers of solid gold that were splendid with emeralds and diamonds.

How poor, and cheap, and trivial these gewgaws seemed in presence of the solemnity, the grandeur, the awful majesty of Death!

Think of Milton, Shakespeare, Washington, standing before a reverent world tricked out in the glass beads, the brass earrings and tin trumpery of the savages of the plains!

and beside these were all manner of cups and vases, and such things, rich in proportion. It was an Aladdin’s palace. The treasures here, by simple weight, without counting workmanship, were valued at fifty millions of francs!

If I could get the custody of them for a while, I fear me the market price of silver bishops would advance shortly, on account of their exceeding scarcity in the Cathedral of Milan.

The priests showed us two of St. Paul’s fingers, and one of St. Peter’s; a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black), and also bones of all the other disciples; a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of his face.

They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter’s at Rome.

I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human hands.

We bid it goodbye, now—possibly for all time. How surely, in some future day, when the memory of it shall have lost its vividness, shall we half believe we have seen it in a wonderful dream, but never with waking eyes!

But they interrupt every dream, every pleasant train of thought, with their tiresome cackling.

Sometimes when I have been standing before some cherished old idol of mine that I remembered years and years ago in pictures in the geography at school, I have thought I would give a whole world if the human parrot at my side would suddenly perish where he stood and leave me to gaze, and ponder, and worship.

No, we did not “wis zo haut can be.” We wished to go to La Scala, the largest theater in the world, I think they call it. We did so. It was a large place.

We saw a manuscript of Virgil, with annotations in the handwriting of Petrarch, the gentleman who loved another man’s Laura, and lavished upon her all through life a love which was a clear waste of the raw material.

It was sound sentiment, but bad judgment.

It brought both parties fame, and created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that is running yet. But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura? (I do not know his other name.) Who glorifies him?

It was sound sentiment, but bad judgment. It brought both parties fame, and created a fountain of commiseration for them in sentimental breasts that is running yet.

But who says a word in behalf of poor Mr. Laura?

(I do not know his other name.) Who glorifies him? Who bedews him with tears? Who writes poetry about him? Nobody. How do you suppose he liked the state of things that has given the world so much pleasure?

They got fame and sympathy—he got neither. This is a peculiarly felicitous instance of what is called poetical justice. It is all very fine; but it does not chime with my notions of right. It is too one-sided—too ungenerous.

Let the world go on fretting about Laura and Petrarch if it will; but as for me, my tears and my lamentations shall be lavished upon the unsung defendant.

We saw also an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia, a lady for whom I have always entertained the highest respect, on account of her rare histrionic capabilities, her opulence in solid gold goblets made of gilded wood, her high distinction as an operatic screamer, and …

We saw one single coarse yellow hair from Lucrezia’s head, likewise.

It awoke emotions, but we still live.

In this same library we saw some drawings by Michelangelo (these Italians call him Mickel Angelo), and Leonardo da Vinci. (They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.) We reserve our opinion of these sketches.

when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord.

We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves.

What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!

when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves.

What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!

I do envy these Europeans the comfort they take. When the work of the day is done, they forget it.

The change that has come over our little party is surprising. Day by day we lose some of our restlessness and absorb some of the spirit of quietude and ease that is in the tranquil atmosphere about us and in the demeanor of the people.

We grow wise apace. We begin to comprehend what life is for.

We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bathhouse. They were going to put all three of us in one bathtub, but we objected. Each of us had an Italian farm on his back.

We have had a bath in Milan, in a public bathhouse. They were going to put all three of us in one bathtub, but we objected.

Each of us had an Italian farm on his back.

We could have felt affluent if we had been officially surveyed and fenced in. We chose to have three bathtubs, and large ones—tubs suited to the dignity of aristocrats who had real estate, and brought it with them.

We had to wait twenty or thirty minutes. The same thing had occurred the evening before, at the hotel. I think I have divined the reason for this state of things at last.

The English know how to travel comfortably, and they carry soap with them; other foreigners do not use the article.

At every hotel we stop at we always have to send out for soap, at the last moment, when we are grooming ourselves for dinner, and they put it in the bill along with the candles and other nonsense.

I envy them their honest admiration, if it be honest—their delight, if they feel delight. I harbor no animosity toward any of them. But at the same time the thought will intrude itself upon me, How can they see what is not visible?

What would you think of a man who looked at some decayed, blind, toothless, pockmarked Cleopatra, and said: “What matchless beauty! What soul! What expression!”

What would you think of a man who gazed upon a dingy, foggy sunset, and said: “What sublimity! What feeling! What richness of coloring!” What would you think of a man who stared in ecstasy upon a desert of stumps and said:

“What sublimity! What feeling! What richness of coloring!” What would you think of a man who stared in ecstasy upon a desert of stumps and said: “Oh, my soul, my beating heart, what a noble forest is here!”

You would think that those men had an astonishing talent for seeing things that had already passed away.

It was what I thought when I stood before The Last Supper and heard men apostrophizing wonders, and beauties and perfections which had faded out of the picture and gone, a hundred years before they were born.

After reading so much about it, I am satisfied that The Last Supper was a very miracle of art once. But it was three hundred years ago.

It vexes me to hear people talk so glibly of “feeling,” “expression,” “tone,” and those other easily acquired and inexpensive technicalities of art that make such a fine show in conversations concerning pictures.

There is not one man in seventy-five hundred that can tell what a pictured face is intended to express.

Troops of picturesque peasant girls, coming from work, hooted at us, shouted at us, made all manner of game of us, and entirely delighted me. My long-cherished judgment was confirmed.

I always did think those frowsy, romantic, unwashed peasant girls I had read so much about in poetry were a glaring fraud.

We enjoyed our jaunt. It was an exhilarating relief from tiresome sightseeing.

The commonest gallantry compelled him to stand by his offer, and so he paid the franc and took the kiss. She was a philosopher.

She said a franc was a good thing to have, and she did not care anything for one paltry kiss, because she had a million left.

Then our comrade, always a shrewd businessman, offered to take the whole cargo at thirty days, but that little financial scheme was a failure.

Then a melting away of familiar faces, of cities, and of tossing waves, into a great calm of forgetfulness and peace.

After which, the nightmare.

Breakfast in the morning, and then the lake.

I speak of the north shore of Tahoe, where one can count the scales on a trout at a depth of a hundred and eighty feet.

I have tried to get this statement off at par here, but with no success; so I have been obliged to negotiate it at fifty percent discount.

At this rate I find some takers; perhaps the reader will receive it on the same terms—ninety feet instead of one hundred and eighty. But let it be remembered that those are forced terms—Sheriff’s sale prices.

a sea whose royal seclusion is guarded by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!

Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup.

It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute—possibly it is Digger.

We passed through the strangest, funniest, undreampt-of old towns, wedded to the customs and steeped in the dreams of the elder ages, and perfectly unaware that the world turns round! And perfectly indifferent, too, as to whether it turns around or stands still.

They have nothing to do but eat and sleep and sleep and eat, and toil a little when they can get a friend to stand by and keep them awake.

They are not paid for thinking—they are not paid to fret about the world’s concerns.

They were not respectable people—they were not worthy people—they were not learned and wise and brilliant people—but in their breasts, all their stupid lives long, resteth a peace that passeth understanding!

How can men, calling themselves men, consent to be so degraded and happy.

We whisked by many a gray old medieval castle, clad thick with ivy that swung its green banners down from towers and turrets where once some old Crusader’s flag had floated. The driver pointed to one of these ancient fortresses, and said, (I translate):

He made a raid on a neighboring baron and completed his outfit with the booty secured. He then razed the castle to the ground, massacred the family and moved on.

They were hardy fellows in the grand old days of chivalry. Alas! Those days will never come again.

Count Luigi grew high in fame in Holy Land. He plunged into the carnage of a hundred battles, but his good Excalibur always brought him out alive, albeit often sorely wounded. His face became browned by exposure to the Syrian sun in long marches;

“The day’s results are meagre, good my lord. An abbot and a dozen beggarly friars is all we have.”

“Hell and furies! Is the estate going to seed? Send hither the mountebanks. Afterward, broil them with the priests.”

The robed and close-cowled harlequins entered. The grim Leonardo sat in state at the head of his council board. Ranged up and down the hall on either hand stood near a hundred men-at-arms.

no dry land visible anywhere, and no sidewalks worth mentioning; if you want to go to church, to the theatre, or to the restaurant, you must call a gondola.

It must be a paradise for cripples, for verily a man has no use for legs here.

For a day or two the place looked so like an overflowed Arkansas town, because of its currentless waters laving the very doorsteps of all the houses, and the cluster of boats made fast under the windows, or skimming in and out of the alleys …

… could not get rid of the impression that there was nothing the matter here but a spring freshet, and that the river would fall in a few weeks and leave a dirty high-water mark on the houses, and the streets full of mud and rubbish.

In the glare of day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered sculptures are hidden in shadows, and the old city seems crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago.

It is easy, then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies—with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the rich argosies of Venetian commerce—with Othellos and Desdemonas, with Iagos and Roderigos—with noble fleets and victorious legions returning from …

goes skimming away, round the corner; and the other girl slams the street door and says, “Well, that infliction’s over, anyway—but I suppose I’ve got to go and see her—tiresome stuck-up thing!”

Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world.

We see the diffident young man, mild of moustache, affluent of hair, indigent of brain, elegant of costume, drive up to her father’s mansion, tell his hackman to bail out and wait, start fearfully up the steps and meet “the old gentleman” right on the …

Human nature is very much the same all over the world; and it is so like my dear native home to see a Venetian lady go into a store and buy ten cents’ worth of blue ribbon and have it sent home in a scow.

Ah, it is these little touches of nature that move one to tears in these far-off foreign lands.

We see little girls and boys go out in gondolas with their nurses, for an airing. We see staid families, with prayerbook and beads, enter the gondola dressed in their Sunday best, and float away to church.

We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off. All our passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in view which I have mentioned.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.

I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.

Wm. L. Ainsworth, travailleur (he meant traveler, I suppose), Etats Unis. George P. Morton et fils, d’Amerique. Lloyd B. Williams, et trois amis, ville de Boston, Amerique. J. Ellsworth Baker, tout de suite de France, place de naissance Amerique, destination la Grand Bretagne.”

I love this sort of people.

A lady passenger of ours tells of a fellow-citizen of hers who spent eight weeks in Paris and then returned home and addressed his dearest old bosom friend Herbert as Mr. “Er‑bare!”

I believe that what I have written and may still write about pictures will give them pain, and I am honestly sorry for it. I even promised that I would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast.

But alas! I never could keep a promise.

I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization.

I even promised that I would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast. But alas! I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization.

It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out.

But I grieve not. I like no halfway things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity. I certainly meant to keep that promise, but I find I can not do it.

I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, the offspring of a South Carolina slave. But it occurred too often for even my self-complacency, did that exasperating “It is nothing—it is of the Renaissance.” I said at last:

“Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”

We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of art.

The guide said that after Titian’s time and the time of the other great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it partially rose again—an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these shabby pictures were the work of their hands.

Then I said, in my heat, that I “wished to goodness high art had declined five hundred years sooner.”

The Renaissance pictures suit me very well, though sooth to say its school were too much given to painting real men and did not indulge enough in martyrs.

We have seen no bravoes with poisoned stilettos, no masks, no wild carnival; but we have seen the ancient pride of Venice, the grim Bronze Horses that figure in a thousand legends.

Venice may well cherish them, for they are the only horses she ever had.

It is said there are hundreds of people in this curious city who never have seen a living horse in their lives. It is entirely true, no doubt.

I have not heard that any of them have called for their dividends yet.

One man did fight along till he was sixty, and started after his pension, but it appeared that there had been a mistake of a year in his family record, and so he gave it up and died.

These artists will take particles of stone or glass no larger than a mustard seed, and piece them together on a sleeve button or a shirt stud, so smoothly and with such nice adjustment of the delicate shades of color the pieces bear, as to …

It is popular to admire the Arno.

It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it.

They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it. I do not see why they are too good to wade.

They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it.

I do not see why they are too good to wade.

How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices sometimes! I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence and find it all beautiful, all attractive.

… the policy of the government is to change the soldiery from one place to another constantly and from country to city, so that they can not become acquainted with the people and grow lax in their duties and enter into plots and conspiracies with friends.

My experiences of Florence were chiefly unpleasant. I will change the subject.

At Pisa we climbed up to the top of the strangest structure the world has any knowledge of—the Leaning Tower.

As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it.

She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery.

All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—and rags and vermin to match.

All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—and rags and vermin to match.

It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.

Look at the grand Duomo of Florence—a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet.

Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don’t you rob your church?”

Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that Cathedral.

And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse everybody I can think of. They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in.

And now—. However, another beggar approaches.

I will go out and destroy him, and then come back and write another chapter of vituperation.

Having eaten the friendless orphan—having driven away his comrades—having grown calm and reflective at length—I now feel in a kindlier mood.

The people here live in alleys two yards wide, which have a smell about them which is peculiar but not entertaining.

It is well the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person can stand, and of course, if they were wider they would hold more, and then the people would die.

These alleys are paved with stone, and carpeted with deceased cats, and decayed rags, and decomposed vegetable-tops, and remnants of old boots, all soaked with dishwater, and the people sit around on stools and enjoy it.

They are indolent, as a general thing, and yet have few pastimes.

They work two or three hours at a time, but not hard, and then they knock off and catch flies.

This does not require any talent, because they only have to grab—if they do not get the one they are after, they get another. It is all the same to them. They have no partialities. Whichever one they get is the one they want.

This does not require any talent, because they only have to grab—if they do not get the one they are after, they get another. It is all the same to them. They have no partialities. Whichever one they get is the one they want.

They have other kinds of insects, but it does not make them arrogant.

They are very quiet, unpretending people. They have more of these kind of things than other communities, but they do not boast.

They judged it best to let me cool down. They thought I wanted to take the town, likely. Little did they know me. I wouldn’t have it. They examined my baggage at the depot.

They took one of my ablest jokes and read it over carefully twice and then read it backwards. But it was too deep for them.

They passed it around, and everybody speculated on it awhile, but it mastered them all.

That was the first time I felt alarmed. I immediately said I would explain the document, and they crowded around.

And so I explained and explained and explained, and they took notes of all I said, but the more I explained the more they could not understand it, and when they desisted at last, I could not even understand it myself.

They said they believed it was an incendiary document, leveled at the government. I declared solemnly that it was not, but they only shook their heads and would not be satisfied. Then they consulted a good while; and finally they confiscated it.

“I saw common men, there—men who were neither priests nor princes—who yet absolutely owned the land they tilled. It was not rented from the church, nor from the nobles. I am ready to take my oath of this.

In that country you might fall from a third story window three several times, and not mash either a soldier or a priest.

—The scarcity of such people is astonishing. In the cities you will see a dozen civilians for every soldier, and as many for every priest or preacher. Jews, there, are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs.

instead of paying thirty-three dollars in taxes, out of every one hundred they receive, they complain if they have to pay seven.

They are curious people. They do not know when they are well off.

Mendicant priests do not prowl among them with baskets begging for the church and eating up their substance. One hardly ever sees a minister of the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a basket, begging for subsistence.

then by nipping their flesh with pincers—red-hot ones, because they are the most comfortable in cold weather; then by skinning them alive a little, and finally by roasting them in public. They always convinced those barbarians.

The true religion, properly administered, as the good Mother Church used to administer it, is very, very soothing.

It is wonderfully persuasive, also. There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an Inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized people.

It is wonderfully persuasive, also. There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an Inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened, civilized people.

It is a great pity the playful Inquisition is no more.

I prefer not to describe St. Peter’s. It has been done before. The ashes of Peter, the disciple of the Saviour, repose in a crypt under the baldachino. We stood reverently in that place;

Weeds and flowers spring from its massy arches and its circling seats, and vines hang their fringes from its lofty walls. An impressive silence broods over the monstrous structure where such multitudes of men and women were wont to assemble in other days.

The butterflies have taken the places of the queens of fashion and beauty of eighteen centuries ago, and the lizards sun themselves in the sacred seat of the Emperor.

More vividly than all the written histories, the Coliseum tells the story of Rome’s grandeur and Rome’s decay. It is the worthiest type of both that exists.

“He a star! handles his sword like an apprentice brigand! he’ll do for the country, may be, but he don’t answer for the metropolis!”

Glad was the contraband that had a seat in the pit at the Saturday matinee, and happy the Roman street-boy who ate his peanuts and guyed the gladiators from the dizzy gallery.

For me was reserved the high honor of discovering among the rubbish of the ruined Coliseum the only playbill of that establishment now extant.

I am the only free white man of mature age, who has accomplished this since Byron originated the expression.

Butchered to make a Roman holiday sounds well for the first seventeen or eighteen hundred thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it begins to grow tiresome.

I find it in all the books concerning Rome—and here latterly it reminds me of Judge Oliver. Oliver was a young lawyer, fresh from the schools, who had gone out to the deserts of Nevada to begin life.

Then, for the first time in his life, I think, Oliver complained. He said,

“This thing is growing monotonous!”

Then he resigned his judgeship and left Humboldt county. “Butchered to make a Roman holiday” has grown monotonous to me.

Dan said the other day to the guide, “Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo!”

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead.

But we have taken it out of this guide. He has marched us through miles of pictures and sculpture in the vast corridors of the Vatican; and through miles of pictures and sculpture in twenty other palaces;

“

Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that.

”

However, he has paid us back, partly, without knowing it. He came to the hotel this morning to ask if we were up, and he endeavored as well as he could to describe us, so that the landlord would know which persons he meant.

He finished with the casual remark that we were lunatics.

The observation was so innocent and so honest that it amounted to a very good thing for a guide to say.

Four years apiece, or thereabouts. It is very suggestive of the unhealthiness of underground graveyards as places of residence. One Pope afterward spent his entire pontificate in the catacombs—eight years. Another was discovered in them and murdered in the episcopal chair.

There was no satisfaction in being a Pope in those days. There were too many annoyances.

There are one hundred and sixty catacombs under Rome, each with its maze of narrow passages crossing and recrossing each other and each passage walled to the top with scooped graves its entire length.

it would sound natural and proper; but when it is seriously stated in the middle of the nineteenth century, by a man of finished education, an LL.D., M.A., and an Archaeological magnate, it sounds strangely enough.

Still, I would gladly change my unbelief for Neligan’s faith, and let him make the conditions as hard as he pleased.

The old gentleman’s undoubting, unquestioning simplicity has a rare freshness about it in these matter-of-fact railroading and telegraphing days. Hear him, concerning the church of Ara Coeli:

“We—upstairs—Monks of the Capuchin order—my brethren.”

“How many departed monks were required to upholster these six parlors?”

“These are the bones of four thousand.”

the nostrils were painfully prominent, the end of the nose being gone; the lips had shriveled away from the yellow teeth: and brought down to us through the circling years, and petrified there, was a weird laugh a full century old!

It was the jolliest laugh, but yet the most dreadful, that one can imagine.

Surely, I thought, it must have been a most extraordinary joke this veteran produced with his latest breath, that he has not got done laughing at it yet.

But when I looked at my purchase, at home, where no glittering blades came into competition with it, I was astonished to see how handsome it was.

To this day my new hats look better out of the shop than they did in it with other new hats.

It begins to dawn upon me, now, that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the galleries may be uniform beauty after all. I honestly hope it is, to others, but certainly it is not to me.

Perhaps the reason I used to enjoy going to the Academy of Fine Arts in New York was because there were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go through the list.

I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen courses.

One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.

They did paint, and they did carve in marble, one historical scene, and one only, (of any great historical consequence). And what was it and why did they choose it, particularly?

It was The Rape of the Sabines, and they chose it for the legs and busts.

I like to look at statues, however, and I like to look at pictures, also—even of monks looking up in sacred ecstacy, and monks looking down in meditation, and monks skirmishing for something to eat—and therefore I drop ill nature to thank the papal government …

I am satisfied, also, that genuine old masters hardly exist at all, in America, because the cheapest and most insignificant of them are valued at the price of a fine farm.

I proposed to buy a small trifle of a Raphael, myself, but the price of it was eighty thousand dollars, the export duty would have made it considerably over a hundred, and so I studied on it awhile and concluded not to take it.

I wish here to mention an inscription I have seen, before I forget it:

… fall a prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs, and “restored” with an unseemly nose, and labeled wrong and dated wrong, and set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble their names on forever and forevermore.

But the surest way to stop writing about Rome is to stop.

I wished to write a real “guidebook” chapter on this fascinating city, but I could not do it, because I have felt all the time like a boy in a candy-shop—there was everything to choose from, and yet no choice.

She has been here several days and will remain several more. We that came by rail from Rome have escaped this misfortune. Of course no one is allowed to go on board the ship, or come ashore from her. She is a prison, now.

The passengers probably spend the long, blazing days looking out from under the awnings at Vesuvius and the beautiful city⁠—and in swearing.

Think of ten days of this sort of pastime!—We go out every day in a boat and request them to come ashore. It soothes them. We lie ten steps from the ship and tell them how splendid the city is;

We got away punctually, and in the course of an hour and a half arrived at the town of Annunciation.

Annunciation is the very last place under the sun.

In other towns in Italy the people lie around quietly and wait for you to ask them a question or do some overt act that can be charged for—but in Annunciation they have lost even that fragment of delicacy;

I am very well satisfied to think the whole population believed in those poor, cheap miracles—a people who want two cents every time they bow to you, and who abuse a woman, are capable of it, I think.

These Neapolitans always ask four times as much money as they intend to take, but if you give them what they first demand, they feel ashamed of themselves for aiming so low, and immediately ask more.

When money is to be paid and received, there is always some vehement jawing and gesticulating about it. One can not buy and pay for two cents’ worth of clams without trouble and a quarrel.

It may be thought that I am prejudiced.

Perhaps I am. I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.

Well, as I was saying, we got our mules and horses, after an hour and a half of bargaining with the population of Annunciation, and started sleepily up the mountain, with a vagrant at each mule’s tail who pretended to be driving the brute along, …

… after an hour and a half of bargaining with the population of Annunciation, and started sleepily up the mountain, with a vagrant at each mule’s tail who pretended to be driving the brute along, but was really holding on and getting himself dragged up instead.

I made slow headway at first, but I began to get dissatisfied at the idea of paying my minion five francs to hold my mule back by the tail and keep him from going up the hill, and so I discharged him.

I got along faster then.

… procession—Bill of fare for a peddler’s breakfast—Princely salaries—Ascent of Vesuvius continued—An average of prices—The wonderful “Blue Grotto”—Visit to celebrated localities in the Bay of Naples—The poisoned “Grotto of the Dog”—A petrified sea of lava—Ascent of Mount Vesuvius continued—The summit reached—Description of the crater—Descent of Vesuvius.

“See Naples and die.” Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a little differently.

To see Naples as we saw it in the early dawn from far up on the side of Vesuvius, is to see a picture of wonderful beauty.

The people are filthy in their habits, and this makes filthy streets and breeds disagreeable sights and smells. There never was a community so prejudiced against the cholera as these Neapolitans are. But they have good reason to be.

The cholera generally vanquishes a Neapolitan when it seizes him, because, you understand, before the doctor can dig through the dirt and get at the disease the man dies.

The upper classes take a sea-bath every day, and are pretty decent.

I only know one clerk—he gets four dollars a month. Printers get six dollars and a half a month, but I have heard of a foreman who gets thirteen.

To be growing suddenly and violently rich, as this man is, naturally makes him a bloated aristocrat. The airs he puts on are insufferable.

And, speaking of wages, reminds me of prices of merchandise. In Paris you pay twelve dollars a dozen for Jouvin’s best kid gloves; gloves of about as good quality sell here at three or four dollars a dozen.

The airs these little insect Governments put on are in the last degree ridiculous. They even put a policeman on board of our boat to keep an eye on us as long as we were in the Capri dominions.

They thought we wanted to steal the grotto, I suppose. It was worth stealing.

The entrance to the cave is four feet high and four feet wide, and is in the face of a lofty perpendicular cliff—the seawall. You enter in small boats—and a tight squeeze it is, too.

I resolved to take a dog and hold him myself; suffocate him a little, and time him; suffocate him some more and then finish him. We reached the grotto at about three in the afternoon, and proceeded at once to make the experiments.

But now, an important difficulty presented itself. We had no dog.

At the Hermitage we were about fifteen or eighteen hundred feet above the sea, and thus far a portion of the ascent had been pretty abrupt. For the next two miles the road was a mixture—sometimes the ascent was abrupt and sometimes it was not:

… rocks weighing many tons a thousand feet into the air, its vast jets of smoke and steam ascended thirty miles toward the firmament, and clouds of its ashes were wafted abroad and fell upon the decks of ships seven hundred and fifty miles at sea!

I will take the ashes at a moderate discount, if anyone will take the thirty miles of smoke, but I do not feel able to take a commanding interest in the whole story by myself.

And, besides, is it not the inborn nature of Street Commissioners to avoid their duty whenever they get a chance? I wish I knew the name of the last one that held office in Pompeii so that I could give him a blast.

I speak with feeling on this subject, because I caught my foot in one of those ruts, and the sadness that came over me when I saw the first poor skeleton, with ashes and lava sticking to it, was tempered by the reflection that may be that party was the Street Commissioner.

No—Pompeii is no longer a buried city.

… corner, and it was a shorter cut to go between the columns of that temple from one street to the other than to go around—and behold that pathway had been worn deep into the heavy flagstone floor of the building by generations of time-saving feet!

They would not go around when it was quicker to go through. We do that way in our cities.

Everywhere, you see things that make you wonder how old these old houses were before the night of destruction came—things, too, which bring back those long dead inhabitants and place the living before your eyes. For instance:

and in the same way you can tell who they were that occupy the tombs. Everywhere around are things that reveal to you something of the customs and history of this forgotten people.

But what would a volcano leave of an American city, if it once rained its cinders on it? Hardly a sign or a symbol to tell its story.

In one of these long Pompeiian halls the skeleton of a man was found, with ten pieces of gold in one hand and a large key in the other.

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves. Let us remember that he was a soldier—not a policeman—and so, praise him.

Being a soldier, he stayed⁠—because the warrior instinct forbade him to fly. Had he been a policeman he would have stayed, also⁠—because he would have been asleep.

There are not half a dozen flights of stairs in Pompeii, and no other evidences that the houses were more than one story high. The people did not live in the clouds, as do the Venetians, the Genoese and Neapolitans of today.

Men lived long lives, in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves, in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name.

Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things?

A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong)—no history, no tradition, no poetry—nothing that can give it even a passing interest.

but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about AD 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock Me to Sleep, Mother.’ ”

These thoughts sadden me. I will to bed.

“Why it’s Scylla and Charybdis.”

“Scylla and Cha⁠—confound it, I thought it was Sodom and Gomorrah!”

And he closed up his glass and went below. The above is the ship story.

… not mean butter, of course, but inasmuch as that article remains in a melted state now since we are out of ice, it is fair to give him the credit of getting one long word in the right place, anyhow, for once in his life.

He said, in Rome, that the Pope was a noble-looking old man, but he never did think much of his Iliad.

We spent one pleasant day skirting along the Isles of Greece. They are very mountainous. Their prevailing tints are gray and brown, approaching to red. Little white villages surrounded by trees, nestle in the valleys or roost upon the lofty perpendicular seawalls.

As we approached a well, near a house, to get a drink, the owner merely glanced at us and went within. He left the quiet, slumbering town at our mercy.

I record it here proudly, that we didn’t do anything to it.

Seeing no road, we took a tall hill to the left of the distant Acropolis for a mark, and steered straight for it over all obstructions, and over a little rougher piece of country than exists anywhere else outside of the State of Nevada, perhaps.

There was instantly a banging of doors and a shout. Denny dropped from the wall in a twinkling, and we retreated in disorder to the gate.

Xerxes took that mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, when his five millions of soldiers and camp-followers followed him to Greece, and if we four Americans could have remained unmolested five minutes longer, we would have taken it too.

The garrison had turned out—four Greeks. We clamored at the gate, and they admitted us. [Bribery and corruption.]

Before us, in the flooding moonlight, rose the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon—the Propylae; a small Temple of Minerva; the Temple of Hercules, and the grand Parthenon.

[We got these names from the Greek guide, who didn’t seem to know more than seven men ought to know.]

These edifices were all built of the whitest Pentelic marble, but have a pinkish stain upon them now. Where any part is broken, however, the fracture looks like fine loaf sugar.

Most of the Parthenon’s imposing columns are still standing, but the roof is gone. It was a perfect building two hundred and fifty years ago, when a shell dropped into the Venetian magazine stored here, and the explosion which followed wrecked and unroofed it.

I remember but little about the Parthenon, and I have put in one or two facts and figures for the use of other people with short memories. Got them from the guidebook.

As we wandered thoughtfully down the marble-paved length of this stately temple, the scene about us was strangely impressive.

What a constellation of celebrated names! But more than all, I wished that old Diogenes, groping so patiently with his lantern, searching so zealously for one solitary honest man in all the world, might meander along and stumble on our party.

I ought not to say it, may be, but still I suppose he would have put out his light.

We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as it had kept it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and stood outside the walls of the citadel.

As we marched along, we began to get over our fears, and ceased to care much about quarantine scouts or anybody else.

We grew bold and reckless; and once, in a sudden burst of courage, I even threw a stone at a dog.

It was a pleasant reflection, though, that I did not hit him, because his master might just possibly have been a policeman. Inspired by this happy failure, my valor became utterly uncontrollable, and at intervals I absolutely whistled, though on a moderate key.

Then he delivered us over to another miscreant, who emerged from some mysterious place, and he in turn to another! For a mile and a half our rear was guarded all the while by armed men.

I never traveled in so much state before in all my life.

It was a good while after that before we ventured to steal any more grapes, and when we did we stirred up another troublesome brigand, and then we ceased all further speculation in that line.

We turned, and, sure enough, there they were—three fantastic pirates armed with guns. We slackened our pace to let them come up, and in the meantime I got out my cargo of grapes and dropped them firmly but reluctantly into the shadows by the wayside.

But I was not afraid. I only felt that it was not right to steal grapes.

And all the more so when the owner was around—and not only around, but with his friends around also. The villains came up and searched a bundle Dr.

The classic Illyssus has gone dry, and so have all the sources of Grecian wealth and greatness.

The nation numbers only eight hundred thousand souls, and there is poverty and misery and mendacity enough among them to furnish forty millions and be liberal about it.

Under King Otho the revenues of the State were five millions of dollars—raised from a tax of one-tenth of all the agricultural products of the land (which tenth the farmer had to bring to the royal granaries on pack-mules any distance not exceeding six leagues) …

For instance, as we approached the Dardanelles, we coasted along the Plains of Troy and past the mouth of the Scamander; we saw where Troy had stood (in the distance), and where it does not stand now—a city that perished when the world was young.

The poor Trojans are all dead, now. They were born too late to see Noah’s ark, and died too soon to see our menagerie.

We saw where Agamemnon’s fleets rendezvoused, and away inland a mountain which the map said was Mount Ida.

it is seldom that both are going ahead at once. This kind of boating is calculated to drive an impatient man mad in a week. The boatmen are the awkwardest, the stupidest, and the most unscientific on earth, without question.

Ashore, it was⁠—well, it was an eternal circus.

People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of.

The shops here are mere coops, mere boxes, bathrooms, closets—anything you please to call them—on the first floor.

The Turks sit cross-legged in them, and work and trade and smoke long pipes, and smell like⁠—like Turks. That covers the ground.

Crowding the narrow streets in front of them are beggars, who beg forever, yet never collect anything; and wonderful cripples, distorted out of all semblance of humanity, almost; vagabonds driving laden asses; porters carrying dry-goods boxes as large as cottages on their backs;

… about, far away in the dim, arched aisles of the Great Bazaar, they look as the shrouded dead must have looked when they walked forth from their graves amid the storms and thunders and earthquakes that burst upon Calvary that awful night of the Crucifixion.

A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once⁠—not oftener.

And then there was the goose-rancher—a fellow who drove a hundred geese before him about the city, and tried to sell them.

How would he blush in presence of the man with fingers on his elbow? Where would he hide himself when the dwarf with seven fingers on each hand, no upper lip, and his under-jaw gone, came down in his majesty? Bismillah!

The cripples of Europe are a delusion and a fraud. The truly gifted flourish only in the byways of Pera and Stamboul.

That three-legged woman lay on the bridge, with her stock in trade so disposed as to command the most striking effect—one natural leg, and two long, slender, twisted ones with feet on them like somebody else’s forearm.

The Mosque of St. Sophia is the chief lion of Constantinople. You must get a firman and hurry there the first thing. We did that.

We did not get a firman, but we took along four or five francs apiece, which is much the same thing.

I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that. It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.

I do not think much of the Mosque of St. Sophia. I suppose I lack appreciation. We will let it go at that.

It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.

I believe all the interest that attaches to it comes from the fact that it was built for a Christian church and then turned into a mosque, without much alteration, by the Mohammedan conquerors of the land.

I caught cold, and got myself so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime and general corruption, that I wore out more than two thousand pair of bootjacks getting my boots off that night, and even then some Christian hide peeled off with them.

I abate not a single bootjack.

St. Sophia is a colossal church, thirteen or fourteen hundred years old, and unsightly enough to be very, very much older. Its immense dome is said to be more wonderful than St.

The people who go into ecstasies over St. Sophia must surely get them out of the guidebook (where every church is spoken of as being “considered by good judges to be the most marvelous structure, in many respects, that the world has ever seen.”)

Or else they are those old connoisseurs from the wilds of New Jersey who laboriously learn the difference between a fresco and a fireplug and from that day forward feel privileged to void their critical bathos on painting, sculpture and architecture forever more.

We visited the Dancing Dervishes. There were twenty-one of them. They wore a long, light-colored loose robe that hung to their heels.

It is the same with silks, antiquities, shawls, etc. The place is crowded with people all the time, and as the gay-colored Eastern fabrics are lavishly displayed before every shop, the great Bazaar of Stamboul is one of the sights that are worth seeing.

It is full of life, and stir, and business, dirt, beggars, asses, yelling peddlers, porters, dervishes, highborn Turkish female shoppers, Greeks, and weird-looking and weirdly dressed Mohammedans from the mountains and the far provinces⁠—and the only solitary thing one does not smell when he is in the Great Bazaar, is something which smells good.

Scarcity of morals and whiskey—Slave-girl market report—Commercial morality at a discount—The slandered dogs of Constantinople—Questionable delights of newspaperdom in Turkey—Ingenious Italian journalism—No more Turkish lunches desired—The Turkish bath fraud—The narghile fraud—Jack-planed by a native—The Turkish coffee fraud.

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce.

The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral.

They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.

It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.

Commercial morals, especially, are bad. There is no gainsaying that.

Greek, Turkish and Armenian morals consist only in attending church regularly on the appointed Sabbaths, and in breaking the ten commandments all the balance of the week.

It comes natural to them to lie and cheat in the first place, and then they go on and improve on nature until they arrive at perfection.

… some of the sheep jumped over them and others scrambled between, occasionally chipping a leg with their sharp hoofs, and when the whole flock had made the trip, the dogs sneezed a little, in the cloud of dust, but never budged their bodies an inch.

I thought I was lazy, but I am a steam-engine compared to a Constantinople dog.

But was not that a singular scene for a city of a million inhabitants?

Newspapers are not popular with the Sultan’s Government. They do not understand journalism. The proverb says, “The unknown is always great.” To the court, the newspaper is a mysterious and rascally institution.

They know what a pestilence is, because they have one occasionally that thins the people out at the rate of two thousand a day, and they regard a newspaper as a mild form of pestilence.

When it goes astray, they suppress it—pounce upon it without warning, and throttle it. When it don’t go astray for a long time, they get suspicious and throttle it anyhow, because they think it is hatching deviltry.

Shortly he printed another from the same source and was imprisoned three months for his pains.

I think I could get the assistant editorship of the Levant Herald, but I am going to try to worry along without it.

To suppress a paper here involves the ruin of the publisher, almost. But in Naples I think they speculate on misfortunes of that kind. Papers are suppressed there every day, and spring up the next day under a new name.

The cook got out his wire, apportioned a proper amount of sausage-meat, spat it on his hands and fell to work! This time, with one accord, we all passed out. We paid and left. That is all I learned about Turkish lunches.

A Turkish lunch is good, no doubt, but it has its little drawbacks.

When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath;

This time, with one accord, we all passed out. We paid and left. That is all I learned about Turkish lunches. A Turkish lunch is good, no doubt, but it has its little drawbacks.

When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast.

For years and years I have dreamed of the wonders of the Turkish bath; for years and years I have promised myself that I would yet enjoy one.

That was the picture, just as I got it from incendiary books of travel. It was a poor, miserable imposture.

The reality is no more like it than the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden.

They received me in a great court, paved with marble slabs;

If I had had a tub then, it would have come natural to me to take in washing. I was then conducted downstairs into the wet, slippery court, and the first things that attracted my attention were my heels.

My fall excited no comment. They expected it, no doubt.

It belonged in the list of softening, sensuous influences peculiar to this home of Eastern luxury. It was softening enough, certainly, but its application was not happy.

This began to look like luxury. I took one blast at it, and it was sufficient; the smoke went in a great volume down into my stomach, my lungs, even into the uttermost parts of my frame.

I exploded one mighty cough, and it was as if Vesuvius had let go.

For the next five minutes I smoked at every pore, like a frame house that is on fire on the inside. Not any more narghile for me.

He bore hard on his mitten, and from under it rolled little cylinders, like macaroni. It could not be dirt, for it was too white. He pared me down in this way for a long time. Finally I said:

“It is a tedious process. It will take hours to trim me to the size you want me; I will wait; go and borrow a jack-plane.”

He paid no attention at all.

Then he brought the world-renowned Turkish coffee that poets have sung so rapturously for many generations, and I seized upon it as the last hope that was left of my old dreams of Eastern luxury. It was another fraud.

Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst.

The cup is small, it is smeared with grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste. The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch deep.

It can not be helped.

All guides are Fergusons to us. We can not master their dreadful foreign names.

Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or anywhere else.

So I went into the harbor of Sebastopol with fear and trembling—full of a vague, horrible apprehension that I was going to be found out and hanged.

But all that time my true passport had been floating gallantly overhead⁠—and behold it was only our flag.

They never asked us for any other.

I remonstrate against these outrages upon reason and truth, of course, but it does no good. I get the same tranquil, unanswerable reply every time:

“It don’t signify⁠—the old woman won’t know any different.”

Ever since we three or four fortunate ones made the midnight trip to Athens, it has afforded him genuine satisfaction to give everybody in the ship a pebble from the Mars Hill where St. Paul preached.

He got all those pebbles on the sea shore, abreast the ship, but professes to have gathered them from one of our party. However, it is not of any use for me to expose the deception—it affords him pleasure, and does no harm to anybody.

He says he never expects to run out of mementoes of St. Paul as long as he is in reach of a sandbank.

Well, he is no worse than others. I notice that all travelers supply deficiencies in their collections in the same way. I shall never have any confidence in such things again while I live.

It has grown discouraged, and stopped. I think it did a wise thing. The difference in time between Sebastopol and the Pacific coast is enormous.

When it is six o’clock in the morning here, it is somewhere about week before last in California.

We are excusable for getting a little tangled as to time. These distractions and distresses about the time have worried me so much that I was afraid my mind was so much affected that I never would have any appreciation of time again;

It reminds me of what Robert Burns’ mother said when they erected a stately monument to his memory:

“Ah, Robbie, ye asked them for bread and they hae gi’en ye a stane.”

The people of Odessa have warmly recommended us to go and call on the Emperor, as did the Sebastopolians. They have telegraphed his Majesty, and he has signified his willingness to grant us an audience.

As this fearful ordeal we are about to pass through pictures itself to my fancy in all its dread sublimity, I begin to feel my fierce desire to converse with a genuine Emperor cooling down and passing away.

What am I to do with my hands? What am I to do with my feet? What in the world am I to do with myself?

Therefore, five gentlemen were appointed to prepare the document, and the fifty others went sadly smiling about the ship—practicing.

During the next twelve hours we had the general appearance, somehow, of being at a funeral, where everybody was sorry the death had occurred, but glad it was over⁠—where everybody was smiling, and yet brokenhearted.

A committee went ashore to wait on his Excellency the Governor-General, and learn our fate.

if he were grievously ill, all the nations would know it before the sun rose again; if he dropped lifeless where he stood, his fall might shake the thrones of half a world!

If I could have stolen his coat, I would have done it. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.

As a general thing, we have been shown through palaces by some plush-legged filagreed flunkey or other, who charged a franc for it;

the dresses were trimmed with blue; both ladies wore broad blue sashes about their waists; linen collars and clerical ties of muslin; low-crowned straw-hats trimmed with blue velvet; parasols and flesh-colored gloves. The Grand Duchess had no heels on her shoes.

I do not know this of my own knowledge, but one of our ladies told me so. I was not looking at her shoes.

I was glad to observe that she wore her own hair, plaited in thick braids against the back of her head, instead of the uncomely thing they call a waterfall, which is about as much like a waterfall as a canvas-covered ham is like a …

but after talking with the company half an hour, the Emperor of Russia and his family conducted us all through their mansion themselves. They made no charge. They seemed to take a real pleasure in it.

We spent half an hour idling through the palace, admiring the cosy apartments and the rich but eminently homelike appointments of the place, and then the Imperial family bade our party a kind goodbye, and proceeded to count the spoons.

An invitation was extended to us to visit the palace of the eldest son, the Crown Prince of Russia, which was near at hand.

there was no ceremony. It was a sort of picnic. I had heard before that we were to breakfast there, but Blucher said he believed Baker’s boy had suggested it to his Imperial Highness. I think not—though it would be like him.

Baker’s boy is the famine-breeder of the ship. He is always hungry.

They say he goes about the staterooms when the passengers are out, and eats up all the soap. And they say he eats oakum. They say he will eat anything he can get between meals, but he prefers oakum.

Baron Wrangel came, also. He used to be Russian Ambassador at Washington. I told him I had an uncle who fell down a shaft and broke himself in two, as much as a year before that.

That was a falsehood, but then I was not going to let any man eclipse me on surprising adventures, merely for the want of a little invention.

The Baron is a fine man, and is said to stand high in the Emperor’s confidence and esteem.

This appeared to be another call on my resources. I was equal to the emergency.

I said we had eighty thousand convicts employed on the railways in America⁠—all of them under sentence of death for murder in the first degree. That closed him out.

We had General Todtleben (the famous defender of Sebastopol, during the siege), and many inferior army and also navy officers, and a number of unofficial Russian ladies and gentlemen. Naturally, a champagne luncheon was in order, and was accomplished without loss of life.

We had General Todtleben (the famous defender of Sebastopol, during the siege), and many inferior army and also navy officers, and a number of unofficial Russian ladies and gentlemen.

Naturally, a champagne luncheon was in order, and was accomplished without loss of life.

Toasts and jokes were discharged freely, but no speeches were made save one thanking the Emperor and the Grand Duke, through the Governor-General, for our hospitable reception, and one by the Governor-General in reply, in which he returned the Emperor’s thanks for the speech, etc., …

I have tried it. I could not talk anything but English, and the girl knew nothing but Greek, or Armenian, or some such barbarous tongue, but we got along very well.

I find that in cases like these, the fact that you can not comprehend each other isn’t much of a drawback.

In that Russian town of Yalta I danced an astonishing sort of dance an hour long, and one I had not heard of before, with a very pretty girl, and we talked incessantly, and laughed exhaustingly, and neither one ever knew what the other was …

Yet when one comes to reflect upon the nature of an oyster, it seems plain that he does not care for scenery. An oyster has no taste for such things; he cares nothing for the beautiful.

An oyster is of a retiring disposition, and not lively⁠—not even cheerful above the average, and never enterprising.

But above all, an oyster does not take any interest in scenery—he scorns it. What have I arrived at now?

This, with the fatigue, and the sun, would put a man asleep; and soon as the man was asleep, the donkey would lie down.

My donkey shall never see his boyhood’s home again. He has lain down once too often. He must die.

We all stood in the vast theatre of ancient Ephesus—the stone-benched amphitheatre I mean—and had our picture taken. We looked as proper there as we would look anywhere, I suppose. We do not embellish the general desolation of a desert much.

We all stood in the vast theatre of ancient Ephesus—the stone-benched amphitheatre I mean—and had our picture taken. We looked as proper there as we would look anywhere, I suppose.

We do not embellish the general desolation of a desert much.

We add what dignity we can to a stately ruin with our green umbrellas and jackasses, but it is little. However, we mean well.

They traveled in many lands, and had many strange adventures. They were virtuous young men, and lost no opportunity that fell in their way to make their livelihood. Their motto was in these words, namely, “Procrastination is the thief of time.”

And so, whenever they did come upon a man who was alone, they said, Behold, this person hath the wherewithal⁠—let us go through him.

And they went through him. At the end of five years they had waxed tired of travel and adventure, and longed to revisit their old home again and hear the voices and see the faces that were dear unto their youth.

And with the sleepers lie also the bottles wherein were once the curious liquors: and upon them is writ, in ancient letters, such words as these—Dames of heathen gods of olden time, perchance: Rumpunch, Jinsling, Egnog.

Such is the story of the Seven Sleepers, (with slight variations), and I know it is true, because I have seen the cave myself.

Really, so firm a faith had the ancients this legend, that as late as eight or nine hundred years ago, learned travelers held it in superstitious fear.

At Constantinople everybody fell to telegraphing the American Consuls at Alexandria and Beirut to give notice that we wanted dragomen and transportation.

We were desperate⁠—would take horses, jackasses, cameleopards, kangaroos⁠—anything.

At Smyrna, more telegraphing was done, to the same end. Also fearing for the worst, we telegraphed for a large number of seats in the diligence for Damascus, and horses for the ruins of Baalbec.

I said nothing, however, but packed up a blanket and a shawl to sleep in, pipes and tobacco, two or three woollen shirts, a portfolio, a guidebook, and a Bible.

I also took along a towel and a cake of soap, to inspire respect in the Arabs, who would take me for a king in disguise.

We were to select our horses at 3 p.m. At that hour Abraham, the dragoman, marshaled them before us.

“That dragon is going to get himself into trouble fetching these old crates out of the hospital the way they are, unless he has got a permit.”

I said nothing. The display was exactly according to the guidebook, and were we not traveling by the guidebook?

I selected a certain horse because I thought I saw him shy, and I thought that a horse that had spirit enough to shy was not to be despised.

It is midnight, now, and we break camp at six in the morning.

They call this camping out. At this rate it is a glorious privilege to be a pilgrim to the Holy Land.

The road was filled with mule trains and long processions of camels. This reminds me that we have been trying for some time to think what a camel looks like, and now we have made it out.

When he is down on all his knees, flat on his breast to receive his load, he looks something like a goose swimming; and when he is upright he looks like an ostrich with an extra set of legs.

Camels are not beautiful, and their long under lip gives them an exceedingly “gallus” expression. They have immense, flat, forked cushions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie with a slice cut out of it.

They have immense, flat, forked cushions of feet, that make a track in the dust like a pie with a slice cut out of it. They are not particular about their diet.

They would eat a tombstone if they could bite it.

A thistle grows about here which has needles on it that would pierce through leather, I think; if one touches you, you can find relief in nothing but profanity. The camels eat these. They show by their actions that they enjoy them.

He appears to have a mortal dread of telegraph poles, especially; and it is fortunate that these are on both sides of the road, because as it is now, I never fall off twice in succession on the same side.

If I fell on the same side always, it would get to be monotonous after a while.

This creature has scared at everything he has seen today, except a haystack. He walked up to that with an intrepidity and a recklessness that were astonishing.

He walked up to that with an intrepidity and a recklessness that were astonishing. And it would fill anyone with admiration to see how he preserves his self-possession in the presence of a barley sack.

This daredevil bravery will be the death of this horse some day.

He is not particularly fast, but I think he will get me through the Holy Land. He has only one fault.

This is all very well, but when he tries to kick a fly off the top of his head with his hind foot, it is too much variety. He is going to get himself into trouble that way some day.

He reaches around and bites my legs too. I do not care particularly about that, only I do not like to see a horse too sociable.

I think the owner of this prize had a wrong opinion about him. He had an idea that he was one of those fiery, untamed steeds, but he is not of that character.

The Sunday-school books exaggerated it a little. The grapes are most excellent to this day, but the bunches are not as large as those in the pictures.

I was surprised and hurt when I saw them, because those colossal bunches of grapes were one of my most cherished juvenile traditions.

Joshua reported favorably, and the children of Israel journeyed on, with Moses at the head of the general government, and Joshua in command of the army of six hundred thousand fighting men. Of women and children and civilians there was a countless swarm.

Then Joshua began his terrible raid, and from Jericho clear to this Baal-Gad, he swept the land like the Genius of Destruction. He slaughtered the people, laid waste their soil, and razed their cities to the ground. He wasted thirty-one kings also.

One may call it that, though really it can hardly be called wasting them, because there were always plenty of kings in those days, and to spare.

At any rate, he destroyed thirty-one kings, and divided up their realms among his Israelites. He divided up this valley stretched out here before us, and so it was once Jewish territory. The Jews have long since disappeared from it, however.

[Noah built the ark.] Over these old hills and valleys the ark that contained all that was left of a vanished world once floated.

I make no apology for detailing the above information. It will be news to some of my readers, at any rate.

Noah’s tomb is built of stone, and is covered with a long stone building. Baksheesh let us in. The building had to be long, because the grave of the honored old navigator is two hundred and ten feet long itself!

Baksheesh let us in. The building had to be long, because the grave of the honored old navigator is two hundred and ten feet long itself! It is only about four feet high, though.

He must have cast a shadow like a lightning-rod.

The proof that this is the genuine spot where Noah was buried can only be doubted by uncommonly incredulous people. The evidence is pretty straight.

It was pleasant to make the acquaintance of members of so respectable a family. It was a thing to be proud of.

It was the next thing to being acquainted with Noah himself.

Noah’s memorable voyage will always possess a living interest for me, henceforward.

… these people use are simply a sharpened stick, such as Abraham plowed with, and they still winnow their wheat as he did—they pile it on the housetop, and then toss it by shovel-fulls into the air until the wind has blown all the chaff away.

They never invent anything, never learn anything.

We had a fine race, of a mile, with an Arab perched on a camel. Some of the horses were fast, and made very good time, but the camel scampered by them without any very great effort.

Nothing could move the pilgrims. They must press on.

Men might die, horses might die, but they must enter upon holy soil next week, with no Sabbath-breaking stain upon them.

Thus they were willing to commit a sin against the spirit of religious law, in order that they might preserve the letter of it. It was not worth while to tell them “the letter kills.” I am talking now about personal friends;

We pleaded for the tired, ill-treated horses, and tried to show that their faithful service deserved kindness in return, and their hard lot compassion.

But when did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?

What were a few long hours added to the hardships of some overtaxed brutes when weighed against the peril of those human souls?

If I were to go to Damascus again, I would camp on Muhammad’s hill about a week, and then go away. There is no need to go inside the walls.

The Prophet was wise without knowing it when he decided not to go down into the paradise of Damascus.

There is an honored old tradition that the immense garden which Damascus stands in was the Garden of Eden, and modern writers have gathered up many chapters of evidence tending to show that it really was the Garden of Eden, and that the rivers Pharpar …

In her old age she saw Rome built; she saw it overshadow the world with its power; she saw it perish. The few hundreds of years of Genoese and Venetian might and splendor were, to grave old Damascus, only a trifling scintillation hardly worth remembering.

Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she lives.

She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.

Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still she lives. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.

Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.

We reached the city gates just at sundown. They do say that one can get into any walled city of Syria, after night, for baksheesh, except Damascus. But Damascus, with its four thousand years of respectability in the world, has many old fogy notions.

We rode half through the city and through the famous “street which is called Straight” without seeing anything, hardly. Our bones were nearly knocked out of joint, we were wild with excitement, and our sides ached with the jolting we had suffered.

I do not like riding in the Damascus streetcars.

We were on our way to the reputed houses of Judas and Ananias.

I hope that no friend of progress and education will obstruct or interfere with my peculiar mission.

The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but not as straight as a rainbow.

St. Luke is careful not to commit himself; he does not say it is the street which is straight, but the “street which is called Straight.” It is a fine piece of irony; it is the only facetious remark in the Bible, I believe.

The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but not as straight as a rainbow. St. Luke is careful not to commit himself; he does not say it is the street which is straight, but the “street which is called Straight.”

It is a fine piece of irony; it is the only facetious remark in the Bible, I believe.

We traversed the street called Straight a good way, and then turned off and called at the reputed house of Ananias. There is small question that a part of the original house is there still;

it is an old room twelve or fifteen feet under ground, and its masonry is evidently ancient. If Ananias did not live there in St. Paul’s time, somebody else did, which is just as well.

I took a drink out of Ananias’ well, and singularly enough, the water was just as fresh as if the well had been dug yesterday.

We went out toward the north end of the city to see the place where the disciples let Paul down over the Damascus wall at dead of night—for he preached Christ so fearlessly in Damascus that the people sought to kill him, just as they …

I had plenty of snow from Mount Hermon, and as it would not stay on my stomach, there was nothing to interfere with my eating it—there was always room for more. I enjoyed myself very well.

Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it.

We left Damascus at noon and rode across the plain a couple of hours, and then the party stopped a while in the shade of some fig-trees to give me a chance to rest.

… same impressive religious solemnity and silence rest upon the desert and the mountains that were upon them in the remote ages of antiquity, and behold, intruding upon a scene like this, comes this fantastic mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping elbows and bobbing umbrellas!

It is Daniel in the lion’s den with a green cotton umbrella under his arm, all over again.

My umbrella is with the baggage, and so are my green spectacles—and there they shall stay. I will not use them. I will show some respect for the eternal fitness of things.

I will not use them. I will show some respect for the eternal fitness of things. It will be bad enough to get sun-struck, without looking ridiculous into the bargain.

If I fall, let me fall bearing about me the semblance of a Christian, at least.

Three or four hours out from Damascus we passed the spot where Saul was so abruptly converted, and from this place we looked back over the scorching desert, and had our last glimpse of beautiful Damascus, decked in its robes of shining green.

… where it gushes out of the mountain side, three hundred yards from the tents, and took a bath that was so icy that if I did not know this was the main source of the sacred river, I would expect harm to come of it.

It was bathing at noonday in the chilly source of the Abana, “River of Damascus,” that gave me the cholera, so Dr. B. said. However, it generally does give me the cholera to take a bath.

The incorrigible pilgrims have come in with their pockets full of specimens broken from the ruins. I wish this vandalism could be stopped. They broke off fragments from Noah’s tomb; from the exquisite sculptures of the temples of Baalbec;

from the worn Greek and Roman inscriptions set in the hoary walls of the Castle of Banias; and now they have been hacking and chipping these old arches here that Jesus looked upon in the flesh.

Heaven protect the Sepulchre when this tribe invades Jerusalem!

The ruins here are not very interesting. There are the massive walls of a great square building that was once the citadel; there are many ponderous old arches that are so smothered with debris that they barely project above the ground;

But when we drew near, we saw that the goggles were nothing but a camp meeting of flies assembled around each of the child’s eyes, and at the same time there was a detachment prospecting its nose.

The flies were happy, the child was contented, and so the mother did not interfere.

As soon as the tribe found out that we had a doctor in our party, they began to flock in from all quarters. Dr. B.

When each individual got his portion of medicine, his eyes were radiant with joy—notwithstanding by nature they are a thankless and impassive race—and upon his face was written the unquestioning faith that nothing on earth could prevent the patient from getting well now.

Christ knew how to preach to these simple, superstitious, disease-tortured creatures: He healed the sick.

They flocked to our poor human Doctor this morning when the fame of what he had done to the sick child went abroad in the land, and they worshiped him with their eyes while they did not know as yet whether there was virtue in …

His nose has been broken at some time or other, and is arched like a culvert now. His under lip hangs down like a camel’s, and his ears are chopped off close to his head.

I had some trouble at first to find a name for him, but I finally concluded to call him Baalbec, because he is such a magnificent ruin.

I can not keep from talking about my horses, because I have a very long and tedious journey before me, and they naturally occupy my thoughts about as much as matters of apparently much greater importance.

It is bound to breed sores. These pirates never think of washing a horse’s back. They do not shelter the horses in the tents, either—they must stay out and take the weather as it comes.

Look at poor cropped and dilapidated “Baalbec,” and weep for the sentiment that has been wasted upon the Selims of romance!

With all respect for those ancient Israelites, I can not overlook the fact that they were not always virtuous enough to withstand the seductions of a golden calf.

Human nature has not changed much since then.

Some forty centuries ago the city of Sodom was pillaged by the Arab princes of Mesopotamia, and among other prisoners they seized upon the patriarch Lot and brought him here on their way to their own possessions.

But Joshua fell upon them and utterly destroyed them, root and branch. That was his usual policy in war.

He never left any chance for newspaper controversies about who won the battle.

He made this valley, so quiet now, a reeking slaughter-pen.

I think I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a man of only ordinary size. I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to a more reasonable shape.

One gets large impressions in boyhood, sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.

“All these kings.”

I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.

I think I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a man of only ordinary size.

I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to a more reasonable shape. One gets large impressions in boyhood, sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life. “All these kings.”

where beauty has dwelt, and passed away; where gladness was, and sorrow is; where the pomp of life has been, and silence and death brood in its high places, there this reptile makes his home, and mocks at human vanity.

His coat is the color of ashes: and ashes are the symbol of hopes that have perished, of aspirations that came to nought, of loves that are buried.

If he could speak, he would say, Build temples: I will lord it in their ruins; build palaces: I will inhabit them; erect empires: I will inherit them; bury your beautiful: I will watch the worms at their work;

Who taught those ancient writers their simplicity of language, their felicity of expression, their pathos, and above all, their faculty of sinking themselves entirely out of sight of the reader and making the narrative stand out alone and seem to tell itself?

Shakespeare is always present when one reads his book; Macaulay is present when we follow the march of his stately sentences; but the Old Testament writers are hidden from view.

If the pit I have been speaking of is the right one, a scene transpired there, long ages ago, which is familiar to us all in pictures. The sons of Jacob had been pasturing their flocks near there.

… rocks and sands of this part of the world is dubbed with the title of “fountain,” and people familiar with the Hudson, the great lakes and the Mississippi fall into transports of admiration over them, and exhaust their powers of composition in writing their praises.

If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn.

During luncheon, the pilgrim enthusiasts of our party, who had been so lighthearted and so happy ever since they touched holy ground that they did little but mutter incoherent rhapsodies, could scarcely eat, so anxious were they to “take shipping” and sail in very person …

Eight crestfallen creatures stood upon the shore, and O, to think of it! this—this—after all that overmastering ecstacy! Oh, shameful, shameful ending, after such unseemly boasting!

It was too much like “Ho! let me at him!” followed by a prudent “Two of you hold him⁠—one can hold me!”

Instantly there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp. The two Napoleons were offered—more if necessary—and pilgrims and dragoman shouted themselves hoarse with pleadings to the retreating boatmen to come back.

Otherwise they would. But they did do it, though—and it did them a world of good to hear the pilgrims abuse each other, too.

We took an unworthy satisfaction in seeing them fall out, now and then, because it showed that they were only poor human people like us, after all.

So we all rode down to Magdala, while the gnashing of teeth waxed and waned by turns, and harsh words troubled the holy calm of Galilee.

And do I not include Church every time I abuse the pilgrims—and would I be likely to speak ill-naturedly of him?

I wish to stir them up and make them healthy; that is all.

We had left Capernaum behind us. It was only a shapeless ruin. It bore no semblance to a town, and had nothing about it to suggest that it had ever been a town. But all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was illustrious ground.

It is as much as I can do to comprehend this stupefying fact.

How it wears a man out to have to read up a hundred pages of history every two or three miles⁠—for verily the celebrated localities of Palestine occur that close together.

How wearily, how bewilderingly they swarm about your path!

She will not ask for baksheesh. She will not even permit of undue familiarity. She assumes a crushing dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all.

Some people can not stand prosperity.

They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it.

The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe by a good deal—it is just about two-thirds as large.

And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow.

The dim waters of this pool can not suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe;

But why should not the truth be spoken of this region?

Is the truth harmful? Has it ever needed to hide its face?

God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work?

They have shown it in their conversation ever since we left Beirut. I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho and Jerusalem—because I have the books they will “smouch” their ideas from.

These authors write pictures and frame rhapsodies, and lesser men follow and see with the author’s eyes instead of their own, and speak with his tongue.

What the pilgrims said at Cesarea Philippi surprised me with its wisdom. I found it afterwards in Robinson. What they said when Genessaret burst upon their vision, charmed me with its grace. I find it in Mr. Thompson’s “Land and the Book.”

In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings.

Phantom ships are on the sea, the dead of twenty centuries come forth from the tombs, and in the dirges of the night wind the songs of old forgotten ages find utterance again.

In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens, and is a theatre meet for great events; meet for the birth of a religion able to save a world;

… done and the words which were spoken in this little acre of rocks and sand eighteen centuries gone, that the bells are ringing today in the remote islands of the sea and far and wide over continents that clasp the circumference of the huge globe?

One can comprehend it only when night has hidden all incongruities and created a theatre proper for so grand a drama.

I had no desire in the world to go there. This seemed a little strange, and prompted me to try to discover what the cause of this unreasonable indifference was. It turned out to be simply because Pliny mentions them.

I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a place that I can have to myself.

It always and eternally transpires that St. Paul has been to that place, and Pliny has “mentioned” it.

It turned out to be simply because Pliny mentions them. I have conceived a sort of unwarrantable unfriendliness toward Pliny and St. Paul, because it seems as if I can never ferret out a place that I can have to myself.

It always and eternally transpires that St. Paul has been to that place, and Pliny has “mentioned” it.

In the early morning we mounted and started. And then a weird apparition marched forth at the head of the procession—a pirate, I thought, if ever a pirate dwelt upon land. It was a tall Arab, as swarthy as an Indian;

In this part of the country his load is oftenest in the shape of colossal sacks—one on each side. He and his cargo take up as much room as a carriage. Think of meeting this style of obstruction in a narrow trail.

The camel would not turn out for a king.

He stalks serenely along, bringing his cushioned stilts forward with the long, regular swing of a pendulum, and whatever is in the way must get out of the way peaceably, or be wiped out forcibly by the bulky sacks.

I saw the little recess from which the angel stepped, but could not fill its void.

The angels that I know are creatures of unstable fancy⁠—they will not fit in niches of substantial stone.

Imagination labors best in distant fields. I doubt if any man can stand in the Grotto of the Annunciation and people with the phantom images of his mind its too tangible walls of stone.

But the pillar remained miraculously suspended in the air, and, unsupported itself, supported then and still supports the roof.

By dividing this statement up among eight, it was found not difficult to believe it.

These gifted Latin monks never do anything by halves.

There is too large a scope of country. The imagination can not work. There is no one particular spot to chain your eye, rivet your interest, and make you think.

The memory of the Pilgrims can not perish while Plymouth Rock remains to us.

The old monks are wise. They know how to drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to its place forever.

There is too large a scope of country. The imagination can not work. There is no one particular spot to chain your eye, rivet your interest, and make you think. The memory of the Pilgrims can not perish while Plymouth Rock remains to us.

The old monks are wise. They know how to drive a stake through a pleasant tradition that will hold it to its place forever.

We visited the places where Jesus worked for fifteen years as a carpenter, and where he attempted to teach in the synagogue and was driven out by a mob.

the priests discovered, a few years ago, that the disciples had sat upon this rock to rest, once, when they had walked up from Capernaum. They hastened to preserve the relic.

Relics are very good property.

Travelers are expected to pay for seeing them, and they do it cheerfully. We like the idea. One’s conscience can never be the worse for the knowledge that he has paid his way like a man.

That is the kind of gruel which has been served out from Palestine for ages.

Commend me to Fenimore Cooper to find beauty in the Indians, and to Grimes to find it in the Arabs.

Arab men are often fine looking, but Arab women are not. We can all believe that the Virgin Mary was beautiful; it is not natural to think otherwise;

I love to quote from Grimes, because he is so dramatic. And because he is so romantic. And because he seems to care but little whether he tells the truth or not, so he scares the reader or excites his envy or his admiration.

He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver, and the other on his pocket-handkerchief.

Always, when he was not on the point of crying over a holy place, he was on the point of killing an Arab. More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever happened to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died.

He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver, and the other on his pocket-handkerchief.

Always, when he was not on the point of crying over a holy place, he was on the point of killing an Arab.

More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever happened to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died.

He went through this peaceful land with one hand forever on his revolver, and the other on his pocket-handkerchief. Always, when he was not on the point of crying over a holy place, he was on the point of killing an Arab.

More surprising things happened to him in Palestine than ever happened to any traveler here or elsewhere since Munchausen died.

At Beit Jin, where nobody had interfered with him, he crept out of his tent at dead of night and shot at what he took to be an Arab lying on a rock, some distance away, planning evil. The ball killed a wolf.

There were our Mohammedan servants, a Latin monk, two Armenians and a Jew in our cortege, and all alike gazed with overflowing eyes.”

If Latin monks and Arabs cried, I know to a moral certainty that the horses cried also, and so the picture is complete.

But when necessity demanded, he could be firm as adamant. In the Lebanon Valley an Arab youth—a Christian; he is particular to explain that Mohammedans do not steal—robbed him of a paltry ten dollars’ worth of powder and shot.

“My eye was not dimmed by those tears nor my heart in aught weakened. Let him who would sneer at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings through Holy Land.”

He never bored but he struck water.

I am aware that this is a pretty voluminous notice of Mr. Grimes’ book.

“The priests then search into the records of the time, and find that it returned precisely at the end of five hundred years.”

Business is business, and there is nothing like punctuality, especially in a phoenix.

The few chapters relating to the infancy of the Saviour contain many things which seem frivolous and not worth preserving. A large part of the remaining portions of the book read like good Scripture, however.

… that a couple of tons of powder placed under the party and touched off would heighten the effect and give to the scene a genuine interest and a charm which it would always be pleasant to recall, even though a man lived a thousand years.

Oriental scenes look best in steel engravings.

I cannot be imposed upon any more by that picture of the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon. I shall say to myself, You look fine, Madam but your feet are not clean and you smell like a camel.

Oriental scenes look best in steel engravings. I cannot be imposed upon any more by that picture of the Queen of Sheba visiting Solomon.

I shall say to myself, You look fine, Madam but your feet are not clean and you smell like a camel.

Presently a wild Arab in charge of a camel train recognized an old friend in Ferguson, and they ran and fell upon each other’s necks and kissed each other’s grimy, bearded faces upon both cheeks.

There was reason in it, too. The custom was natural and proper; because people must kiss, and a man would not be likely to kiss one of the women of this country of his own free will and accord.

One must travel, to learn.

Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.

Here were the “picturesque costumes!” This was the “gallant spectacle!” Tatterdemalion vagrants—cheap braggadocio—“Arabian mares” spined and necked like the ichthyosaurus in the museum, and humped and cornered like a dromedary!

To glance at the genuine son of the desert is to take the romance out of him forever⁠—to behold his steed is to long in charity to strip his harness off and let him fall to pieces.

Presently we came to a ruinous old town on a hill, the same being the ancient Jezreel.

In the new Territories, when a man puts his hand on a weapon, he knows that he must use it; he must use it instantly or expect to be shot down where he stands.

Those pilgrims had been reading Grimes.

There was nothing for us to do in Samaria but buy handfuls of old Roman coins at a franc a dozen, and look at a dilapidated church of the Crusaders and a vault in it which once contained the body of John the Baptist.

The name of this unpretending hole in the ground, which one might pass by and take no notice of, is as familiar as household words to even the children and the peasants of many a far-off country.

It is more famous than the Parthenon; it is older than the Pyramids.

It was by this well that Jesus sat and talked with a woman of that strange, antiquated Samaritan community I have been speaking of, and told her of the mysterious water of life.

It is not likely that they undervalue a distinction such as this.

Samaritan nature is human nature, and human nature remembers contact with the illustrious, always.

For an offense done to the family honor, the sons of Jacob exterminated all Shechem once.

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is. The appearance of the city is peculiar.

It is as knobby with countless little domes as a prison door is with bolt-heads.

Every house has from one to half a dozen of these white plastered domes of stone, broad and low, sitting in the centre of, or in a cluster upon, the flat roof.

The houses are generally two stories high, built strongly of masonry, whitewashed or plastered outside, and have a cage of wooden latticework projecting in front of every window.

To reproduce a Jerusalem street, it would only be necessary to upend a chicken-coop and hang it before each window in an alley of American houses.

The streets are roughly and badly paved with stone, and are tolerably crooked—enough so to make each street appear to close together constantly and come to an end about a hundred yards ahead of a pilgrim as long as he chooses to walk in it.

… of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda.

Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.

One naturally goes first to the Holy Sepulchre. It is right in the city, near the western gate;

This piece of the cross was discovered in the sixteenth century. The Latin priests say it was stolen away, long ago, by priests of another sect.

That seems like a hard statement to make, but we know very well that it was stolen, because we have seen it ourselves in several of the cathedrals of Italy and France.

But the relic that touched us most was the plain old sword of that stout Crusader, Godfrey of Bulloigne—King Godfrey of Jerusalem.

These statements are all well authenticated in many legends that are among the most trustworthy legends the good old Catholic monks preserve. I can never forget old Godfrey’s sword, now.

I tried it on a Muslim, and clove him in twain like a doughnut.

The spirit of Grimes was upon me, and if I had had a graveyard I would have destroyed all the infidels in Jerusalem.

This is because, in great convulsions of nature, at three different times, masses of the earth—whole ranges of mountains, probably—have flown off into space, thus lessening the diameter of the earth, and changing the exact locality of its centre by a point or two.

This is a very curious and interesting circumstance, and is a withering rebuke to those philosophers who would make us believe that it is not possible for any portion of the earth to fly off into space.

To satisfy himself that this spot was really the centre of the earth, a sceptic once paid well for the privilege of ascending to the dome of the church to see if the sun gave him a shadow at noon. He came down perfectly convinced.

It is a singular circumstance that right under the roof of this same great church, and not far away from that illustrious column, Adam himself, the father of the human race, lies buried.

There is no question that he is actually buried in the grave which is pointed out as his⁠—there can be none⁠—because it has never yet been proven that that grave is not the grave in which he is buried.

The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation.

There is no question that he is actually buried in the grave which is pointed out as his—there can be none—because it has never yet been proven that that grave is not the grave in which he is buried.

The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation.

True, a distant one, but still a relation. The unerring instinct of nature thrilled its recognition. The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths, and I gave way to tumultuous emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears.

I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor dead relative. Let him who would sneer at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings through Holy Land.

Noble old man⁠—he did not live to see me⁠—he did not live to see his child.

And I—I—alas, I did not live to see him. Weighed down by sorrow and disappointment, he died before I was born—six thousand brief summers before I was born. But let us try to bear it with fortitude.

Not half a dozen persons knew where they buried the Saviour, perhaps, and a burial is not a startling event, anyhow; therefore, we can be pardoned for unbelief in the Sepulchre, but not in the place of the Crucifixion.

Five hundred years hence there will be no vestige of Bunker Hill Monument left, but America will still know where the battle was fought and where Warren fell.

The crucifixion of Christ was too notable an event in Jerusalem, and the Hill of Calvary made too celebrated by it, to be forgotten in the short space of three hundred years.

In the Milan cathedral it costs five francs to see it, and at St. Peter’s, at Rome, it is almost impossible to see it at any price.

No tradition is so amply verified as this of St. Veronica and her handkerchief.

At the next corner we saw a deep indention in the hard stone masonry of the corner of a house, but might have gone heedlessly by it but that the guide said it was made by the elbow of the Saviour, who stumbled here and …

when he made his memorable entry into the city upon an ass. One of the pilgrims said, “But there is no evidence that the stones did cry out—Christ said that if the people stopped from shouting Hosannah, the very stones would do it.”

The guide was perfectly serene. He said, calmly, “This is one of the stones that would have cried out.”

It was of little use to try to shake this fellow’s simple faith—it was easy to see that.

He does this every fifty years, just the same. It is hopeless, but then it is hard to break habits one has been eighteen hundred years accustomed to. The old tourist is far away on his wanderings, now.

How he must smile to see a pack of blockheads like us, galloping about the world, and looking wise, and imagining we are finding out a good deal about it!

He must have a consuming contempt for the ignorant, complacent asses that go skurrying about the world in these railroading days and call it traveling.

The old tourist is far away on his wanderings, now. How he must smile to see a pack of blockheads like us, galloping about the world, and looking wise, and imagining we are finding out a good deal about it!

He must have a consuming contempt for the ignorant, complacent asses that go skurrying about the world in these railroading days and call it traveling.

When the guide pointed out where the Wandering Jew had left his familiar mark upon a wall, I was filled with astonishment. It read:

She carried her gossiping to such an extreme that nothing could be kept private—nothing could be done or said on earth but everybody in perdition knew all about it before the sun went down.

It was about time to suppress this woman’s telegraph, and it was promptly done. Her breath subsided about the same time.

The inside of the great mosque is very showy with variegated marble walls and with windows and inscriptions of elaborate mosaic. The Turks have their sacred relics, like the Catholics.

It is pleasant to know we are disappointed, in that we never dreamed we might see portions of the actual Temple of Solomon, and yet experience no shadow of suspicion that they were a monkish humbug and a fraud.

We are surfeited with sights.

Nothing has any fascination for us, now, but the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. We have been there every day, and have not grown tired of it; but we are weary of everything else. The sights are too many.

Our pilgrims compress too much into one day.

One can gorge sights to repletion as well as sweetmeats.

Since we breakfasted, this morning, we have seen enough to have furnished us food for a year’s reflection if we could have seen the various objects in comfort and looked upon them deliberately.

They showed us the tomb of Lazarus. I had rather live in it than in any house in the town. And they showed us also a large “Fountain of Lazarus,” and in the centre of the village the ancient dwelling of Lazarus.

Lazarus appears to have been a man of property. The legends of the Sunday Schools do him great injustice; they give one the impression that he was poor.

It is because they get him confused with that Lazarus who had no merit but his virtue, and virtue never has been as respectable as money.

Lazarus appears to have been a man of property. The legends of the Sunday Schools do him great injustice; they give one the impression that he was poor.

It is because they get him confused with that Lazarus who had no merit but his virtue, and virtue never has been as respectable as money.

The house of Lazarus is a three-story edifice, of stone masonry, but the accumulated rubbish of ages has buried all of it but the upper story.

We were moping along down through this dreadful place, every man in the rear. Our guards—two gorgeous young Arab sheiks, with cargoes of swords, guns, pistols and daggers on board—were loafing ahead.

Every man shrunk up and disappeared in his clothes like a mud-turtle.

My first impulse was to dash forward and destroy the Bedouins. My second was to dash to the rear to see if there were any coming in that direction. I acted on the latter impulse. So did all the others.

Every man shrunk up and disappeared in his clothes like a mud-turtle.

My first impulse was to dash forward and destroy the Bedouins. My second was to dash to the rear to see if there were any coming in that direction.

I acted on the latter impulse. So did all the others. If any Bedouins had approached us, then, from that point of the compass, they would have paid dearly for their rashness. We all remarked that, afterwards.

Such was the awful sentence that thundered from his lips.

What was grammar to a desperado like that?

I was glad in my heart that I had been spared these scenes of malignant carnage. No Bedouins attacked our terrible rear. And none attacked the front.

No, the water did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance; it was not very slimy; and

I could not discover that we smelt really any worse than we have always smelt since we have been in Palestine.

It was only a different kind of smell, but not conspicuous on that account, because we have a great deal of variety in that respect. We didn’t smell, there on the Jordan, the same as we do in Jerusalem;

We didn’t smell, there on the Jordan, the same as we do in Jerusalem; and we don’t smell in Jerusalem just as we did in Nazareth, or Tiberias, or Cesarea Philippi, or any of those other ruinous ancient towns in Galilee.

No, we change all the time, and generally for the worse. We do our own washing.

It was a funny bath. We could not sink.

It was the variegated villainy and novelty of it that charmed us. Salt crystals glitter in the sun about the shores of the lake. In places they coat the ground like a brilliant crust of ice.

When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide.

It is only ninety miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know which side of it he is on half the time. In going ninety miles it does not get over more than fifty miles of ground.

When I was a boy I somehow got the impression that the river Jordan was four thousand miles long and thirty-five miles wide.

It is only ninety miles long, and so crooked that a man does not know which side of it he is on half the time.

In going ninety miles it does not get over more than fifty miles of ground. It is not any wider than Broadway in New York.

There is the Sea of Galilee and this Dead Sea—neither of them twenty miles long or thirteen wide. And yet when I was in Sunday School I thought they were sixty thousand miles in diameter.

Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most cherished traditions of our boyhood.

Well, let them go. I have already seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of the State of Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the river.

Travel and experience mar the grandest pictures and rob us of the most cherished traditions of our boyhood. Well, let them go.

I have already seen the Empire of King Solomon diminish to the size of the State of Pennsylvania; I suppose I can bear the reduction of the seas and the river.

We looked everywhere, as we passed along, but never saw grain or crystal of Lot’s wife. It was a great disappointment. For many and many a year we had known her sad story, and taken that interest in her which misfortune always inspires.

It oppresses me yet, to think of it. The sun so pelted us that the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice. The ghastly, treeless, grassless, breathless canyons smothered us as if we had been in an oven.

The sun had positive weight to it, I think.

Not a man could sit erect under it. All drooped low in the saddles. John preached in this “Wilderness!” It must have been exhausting work.

Their lips are lips that never kiss and never sing; their hearts are hearts that never hate and never love; their breasts are breasts that never swell with the sentiment, “I have a country and a flag.”

They are dead men who walk.

I set down these first thoughts because they are natural—not because they are just or because it is right to set them down.

and that is, the honest gratitude I and all pilgrims owe, to the Convent Fathers in Palestine. Their doors are always open, and there is always a welcome for any worthy man who comes, whether he comes in rags or clad in purple.

The Catholic Convents are a priceless blessing to the poor.

A pilgrim without money, whether he be a Protestant or a Catholic, can travel the length and breadth of Palestine, and in the midst of her desert wastes find wholesome food and a clean bed every night, in these buildings.

but it is the true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found it impossible to think at all—though in good sooth it is not respectable to say it, and not poetical, either.

We do not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

Every outline is harsh, every feature is distinct, there is no perspective—distance works no enchantment here.

It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land.

Small shreds and patches of it must be very beautiful in the full flush of spring, however, and all the more beautiful by contrast with the far-reaching desolation that surrounds them on every side.

I would like much to see the fringes of the Jordan in springtime, and Shechem, Esdraelon, Ajalon and the borders of Galilee—but even then these spots would seem mere toy gardens set at wide intervals in the waste of a limitless desolation.

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.

Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.

… have vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour’s voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.

Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?

Palestine is no more of this workday world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition—it is dreamland.

They were good-natured rascals, and so were the donkeys. We mounted, and the boys ran behind us and kept the donkeys in a furious gallop, as is the fashion at Damascus. I believe I would rather ride a donkey than any beast in the world.

He goes briskly, he puts on no airs, he is docile, though opinionated.

Satan himself could not scare him, and he is convenient—very convenient. When you are tired riding you can rest your feet on the ground and let him gallop from under you.

I believe I would rather ride a donkey than any beast in the world. He goes briskly, he puts on no airs, he is docile, though opinionated. Satan himself could not scare him, and he is convenient—very convenient.

When you are tired riding you can rest your feet on the ground and let him gallop from under you.

We found the hotel and secured rooms, and were happy to know that the Prince of Wales had stopped there once. They had it everywhere on signs. No other princes had stopped there since, till Jack and I came.

The relic-hunter battered at these persistently, and sweated profusely over his work. He might as well have attempted to deface the moon. They regarded him serenely with the stately smile they had worn so long, and which seemed to say, “

Peck away, poor insect; we were not made to fear such as you

; in ten-score dragging ages we have seen more of your kind than there are sands at your feet: have they left a blemish upon us?”

We were not a very large party, but as we charged through the streets of the great metropolis, we made noise for five hundred, and displayed activity and created excitement in proportion.

Nobody can steer a donkey, and some collided with camels, dervishes, effendis, asses, beggars and everything else that offered to the donkeys a reasonable chance for a collision.

When we turned into the broad avenue that leads out of the city toward Old Cairo, there was plenty of room. The walls of stately date-palms that fenced the gardens and bordered the way, threw their shadows down and made the air cool and bracing.

A laborious walk in the flaming sun brought us to the foot of the great Pyramid of Cheops.

It was a fairy vision no longer. It was a corrugated, unsightly mountain of stone.

Each of its monstrous sides was a wide stairway which rose upward, step above step, narrowing as it went, till it tapered to a point far aloft in the air.

Why try to call up the traditions of vanished Egyptian grandeur; why try to fancy Egypt following dead Rameses to his tomb in the Pyramid, or the long multitude of Israel departing over the desert yonder?

Why try to think at all? The thing was impossible.

One must bring his meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them afterward.

why try to fancy Egypt following dead Rameses to his tomb in the Pyramid, or the long multitude of Israel departing over the desert yonder? Why try to think at all? The thing was impossible.

One must bring his meditations cut and dried, or else cut and dry them afterward.

The traditional Arab proposed, in the traditional way, to run down Cheops, cross the eighth of a mile of sand intervening between it and the tall pyramid of Cephron, ascend to Cephron’s summit and return to us on the top of Cheops—all in nine minutes …

In the first flush of irritation, I said let the Arab and his exploits go to the mischief. But stay. The upper third of Cephron was coated with dressed marble, smooth as glass. A blessed thought entered my brain.

He must infallibly break his neck.

Close the contract with dispatch, I said, and let him go. He started. We watched. He went bounding down the vast broadside, spring after spring, like an ibex. He grew small and smaller till he became a bobbing pygmy, away down toward the bottom—then disappeared.