CONTENTS II. THE AZORES ISLANDS—And Beyond..... III. ATHENS AND HER HILLS OF GLORY. INTRODUCTION FROM time immemorial people have been interested in the stories of travelers. What a man has seen and experienced is of the first importance, because each of us would also like to see and to experience the same. Knowledge as such belongs to all peoples. It is fundamentally democratic. What concerns one man is sure to concern another; what is instructive to one man may also be instructive to another. Among the most effective methods of the education of mankind is to know other peoples, their lands, their homes, and their institutions. For while there is a common element in all society that makes the whole world kin, there are also differences which excite our interest, enlarge the scope of our knowledge, and enable us to find more and better reasons for the things that we do and believe, or for the things that we hope to do and achieve. As we cannot all travel and many of us must stay at home and range through a limited region, we look to our more favored friends to whom the opportunity comes to seek out the old and the new civilizations of the earth. Not only to go there, but to see with clear and interested sight the things to be seen and also to be able to report their experiences in an interesting, instructive way. There are some persons that can see better than we can see; what we might overlook their keen, practical vision will detect; there are many who have the fine faculty of describing what they see better than we could describe |