I

BY EDWARD

66

T seems to me curious that so few people write about travels in the United States. One in a thousand of the intelligent Americans who travel in Europe puts his observations in print. One in fifty of the people who cross Asia do the same; and every one who crosses Africa does. But of the travelers of America you might count on the fingers of two hands all worth reading that have been printed in the last twenty years.

Of which one consequence is that when you talk with intelligent Americans you find that they know more of Switzerland and perhaps of Moscow or of Stonehenge than they know of Indianapolis, or of Trenton Falls, or of Bonaventure, or Chimborazo. You can go to an illustrated lecture and come home and feel afterwards that you have been on a Norwegian canal or a Portuguese railway. But if there are such shows of my own country, I am not favored. I am always on the lookout for them, but I never find them.

A little boy who was a friend of mine was studying arithmetic at school, and he came to the process known by the schoolmasters as long division. It said in the book, "Inquire how many times the Divisor goes into the Dividend." So when he had his slate adjusted to Divisor and Dividend, he went to ask his teacher how far one went into the other. She remonstrated, but he said that that Copyright, 195, the Outlook Company, New York.

was what the book said-it told him to "inquire," and he "inquired."

The average American is left in very much the condition of that boy. If he wants to know about Vermont, he cannot find any book that tells him. Whoever he speaks to about it is annoyed or pretends to gape, and tells him to go to Vermont and see. The newspapers are painfully provincial. It is hard to make them print some spirited letter from a bright friend who is traveling in the steps of Lewis and Clark, or among the wonders of California. Once there were such books as Lewis and Clark's or Fremont's, or Francis Parkman's or Dwight's "Travels in New England," or Flint's "Mississippi." But, as I say, we do not find such books now. One recollects, of course, "Their Wedding Journey of Howells, and "A Chance Acquaintance," and other such fragments. But not enough of them. I sent to a magazine a good story once, where the bride and her husband traveled on the Vanderbilt lines. I had to strike out this allusion lest it should be an advertisement !

I should like to have exactly such a book about the United States as an English doctor, whose name I have forgotten, made about the Continent of Europe just after Napoleon was sent to Elba. English people had been shut off from the Continent for half a generation. In fact, unless they were named

and at the end of the week I only have to draw for twenty-five dollars from my banker. But in America, wherever I go, the railways make me pay so much, and the hotels make me pay so much, and the steamboats, that just as I am ready for my grand tour in America, some one says to me, "Take a second-class ticket with me for Hamburg;" and I do, and we travel in Bohemia instead of going to Tacoma. It is only by pretending to be a schoolmaster and taking a half-price

I will not pretend to speak it. Some of the best essays about this world which have been written are the prefaces to Murray's and Baedeker's Guide-Books. They do not tell the traveler'what he is to see. That comes afterwards in the book. But they try to quicken his enthusiasm, to make him see that travel is worth while, and to understand that it is neither so dangerous nor so difficult as he supposes. I will try here, mostly by memories, sometimes by expectations,

ticket to attend an " Educational Convention "-as if there were any such word as "educational," and as if there were much use in a convention-it is only thus that I can go to see Bunker Hill, if I happen to live in the North Park. All of which we will hope the future will reform for us.

Having said this, I will try to start the intelligent reader on his own feet; and we will give him some hint of what he ought to see, and I will not pretend to show it to him. He shall have some other hint of what he ought to hear, but

with an occasional word of the present fact, to interest the average reader in some plan for seeing some part of his own home, which he has never seen until

now.

There are two notable studies of New England which you had better read right through before you make your plans for next June. They are in the first volume and the second of Dr. Palfrey's "History of New England." They not only tell what he knew, which was a great deal, but they give you almost all the

He

Dear Dr. Palfrey says with a certain pride that it is just half-way from the Equator to the Pole, and this is interesting, for it gives some slight scientific authority to Dr. Holmes's claim that the gilded dome of the Boston State House is the "Hub of the Universe." Indeed, it would amuse the first class in the ninth grade of some grammar school to see how nearly that same gilded dome is at the center of inhabited New England. Possibly some advanced student in that class may find out, what is unknown to all the readers of these lines, why the accomplished architect Charles Bulfinch put a pineapple on top of the dome.

references which you need if you have the genuine historical passion. As I believe I have already said, the average American has no such passion. does not care anything about history. This is indeed the proverb of the hustling editor of to-day-that even newspapers have nothing to do with history. One of them, with pathetic blindness, quoted from Jules Verne the remark that you got no history out of the newspaper, really thinking that Jules Verne intended this for a compliment. But there are occasional people who are curious to know where the plant of Indian corn came from, and what sort of a seed it had; where the pine-tree came from, and what sort of a seed it had. And that sort of people like to know what the thirteen States were, and why they were different from the thirtytwo others; what a New England forest was, and how it differs from the New England of factories and high schools; who Massasoit or Canonicus were, and how they differed from Charles William Eliot and John Davis Long. These people are the people who care for his tory, and they will be glad of such references as Dr. Palfrey gives them; and they will be glad to read the chapters of which I have spoken; and in very rare cases they will go to the American Antiquarian Library or the John Carter Brown collection of books in Providence, or the Massachusetts Historical Society's Library, or to that of Harvard College, to see for themselves the original authorities.

For our present purpose it must be enough to say that New England is a peninsula included within an oblong which, if roughly drawn, measures eight degrees of latitude and nine of longitude-a little more accurately, perhaps, sixty or eighty thousand square miles.

Some of the old writers really thought that New England was an island. What they knew was that Henry Hudson had worked his way up from the ocean on the south as far as Albany, that Champlain had come by water from the ocean on the north as far as Lake Champlain, that between Albany and the head of Lake George there is not a wide distance. In point of fact, I believe the neck of land between the waters which flow into the St. Lawrence and the waters which flow into the Hudson is not more than two miles across. If anybody cares, it was within twenty miles of this neck that Burgoyne received his coup de grâce, and that the history of modern civilization changed when, in his capitulation, the independence of the United States was made sure.

I was once at an evening party, talking with one of the great New Englanders, John Albion Andrew, when Louis Agassiz joined us. I said, Agassiz, I wish you would tell Andrew what I am telling him; you would do it so much better than I." Naturally, he asked me what I was telling him. Now, it was at the time of one of our prehistoric quar

rels with England, when the understanding between the two countries was not as cordial as it is now. England and the United States were quarreling about 54-40, or codfish, or something I have forgotten what. I said, "I am telling Andrew how you told us that when the Lord God thought he would make a world out of a spinning ball of red-hot water and steam which there was, he made some rocks rise up as a sort of nucleus of the man-habitable world, and that the first thing he thought of was to make the ridge between the United States and Canada."

Agassiz laughed, and said that he had not put it in exactly that way, but that that was the truth. And whoever reads the old treaty of 1783 will be edified in finding that the highlands between the waters flowing into the St. Lawrence and the waters flowing into the Atlantic were named by those ungeological diplomatists who made the treaty, as the northern boundary of New England. That critical ridge of rock which poked its head up on that fine morning described in the ninth verse of the first chapter of Genesis may still be traced by the amateur fisherman who has gone up to the narrow trout brook at the head of the Connecticut. It is the same rock which you pass on the Vanderbilt road,

just north of the Mohawk, at Herkimer and along in such places, if you are on Howells's Howells's "Wedding Journey" or on Lucy Poor's. Lord Ashburton and Mr. Webster agreed for the northeastern part of the country to make an artificial line. But you and I, for the convenience of things, may recollect that all of us New Englanders probably live above the oldest land in the world. That is the reason of a certain arrogance which other people accuse us of. But, really, we have not much to do with that steaming rock of a hundred million æons ago, for all New England was made over again, it seems, when the glaciers came down from the north, covering us all over with a sheet of ice which was a thousand feet thick, or more, even over the top of our Mount Washington. drifted south and south and south, until the Atlantic Ocean proved to be too warm for it. It left its gravel and sand and smaller boulders first in a ridge which became Long Island, Block Island, and Nantucket, and, after years more, it made another ridge which is now southern Connecticut and southern Rhode Island and Cape Cod, I suppose, including, among other excellent places, my own summer home. And, still again, it made a third ridge, five or ten miles inland from the Long Island Sound of