TARRY AT HOME TRAVELS CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY It 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 does the same; and every one who crosses Africa does. But of the travellers of America you might count on the fingers of two hands all who have written anything worth reading that has 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 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 travelling in the steps of Lewis and Clark, or among the wonders of California. Once there were such books as Lewis and Clark's or Frémont'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, "The 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 travelled 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 Arthur Young, Addison, or Prior, or Sterne, or John Milton, they had not gone there much before. One of the charms of Jane Austen's novels is that they are exquisitely insular. A post-captain or an admiral may be alluded to because Britannia rules the waves. But the continent of Europe or the double continent of America is referred to no more than the Planet Neptune, of which she had never heard. This unknown English doctor sent his English carriage across to Calais, made up a party of four, took his life in his hands, and rode to Italy and back again, and told from day to day just what he had seen. It is graceless of me to forget his name, for he wrote a very entertaining book. Dear old Dr. Dwight, the President of Yale College, started from New Haven, a hundred years ago, and jumbled about the New England states and wrote an account of them in just the same way. Our friend Mr. Lummis started with his dog, both on foot, from Chillicothe in Ohio and walked to Los Angeles in California. The dog died, but Mr. Lummis wrote a very entertaining book about the journey. But Dr. Dwight is in heaven; I suppose the English doctor is, for if he were alive, he |