(1)”THIS book is a record of a pleasure trip.

If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have

about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of
that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet notwithstanding it is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is
to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes
instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretense of showing anyone
how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea -- other books do that, and therefore, even if I were
competent to do it, there is no need.

I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me --
for I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not.

In this volume I have used portions of letters which I wrote for the Daily Alta California, of San Francisco, the
proprietors of that journal having waived their rights and given me the necessary permission. I have also
inserted portions of several letters written for the New York Tribune and the New York Herald.

THE AUTHOR.
SAN FRANCISCO”

(2)”The Old Travelers -- those delightful parrots who have "been here before" and know more about the country
than Louis Napoleon knows now or ever will know -- tell us these things, and we believe them because they are
pleasant things to believe and because they are plausible and savor of the rigid subjection to law and order
which we behold about us everywhere.
But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment
we see them. They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every
individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do brag, and
sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim, is to
subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory!
They will not let you know anything. They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at
your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the
stupidest absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they have set up for
your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast! But still I love the Old Travelers. I love
them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their
luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity!”

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(3)”Ah, the grisettes! I had almost forgotten. They are another romantic fraud. They were (if you let the books of
travel tell it) always so beautiful -- so neat and trim, so graceful -- so naive and trusting -- so gentle, so winning
-- so faithful to their shop duties, so irresistible to buyers in their prattling importunity -- so devoted to their
poverty-stricken students of the Latin Quarter -- so lighthearted and happy on their Sunday picnics in the
suburbs -- and oh, so charmingly, so delightfully immoral!

Stuff! For three or four days I was constantly saying:

"Quick, Ferguson! Is that a grisette?"

And he always said, "No."

(4) ”They were like nearly all the Frenchwomen I ever saw -- homely. They had large hands, large feet, large
mouths; they had pug noses as a general thing, and moustaches that not even good breeding could overlook;
they combed their hair straight back without parting; they were ill-shaped, they were not winning, they were not
graceful; I knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and finally, to my thinking it would be
base flattery to call them immoral.”

(5)”All visitors linger pensively about it; all young people capture and carry away keepsakes and mementoes of
it; all Parisian youths and maidens who are disappointed in love come there to bail out when they are full of
tears; yea, many stricken lovers make pilgrimages to this shrine from distant provinces to weep and wail and
"grit" their teeth over their heavy sorrows, and to purchase the sympathies of the chastened spirits of that tomb
with offerings of immortelles and budding flowers.

Go when you will, you find somebody snuffling over that tomb. Go when you will, you find it furnished with
those bouquets and immortelles. Go when you will, you find a gravel-train from Marseilles arriving to supply the
deficiencies caused by memento-cabbaging vandals whose affections have miscarried.”

(6)”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.”

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(7) ”The country is precisely what it was when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were possible characters. But I
see now what the glory of Spain must have been when it was under Moorish domination. No, I will not say that
— but then when one is carried away, infatuated, entranced, with the wonders of the Alhambra and the
supernatural beauty of the Alcazar, he is apt to overflow with admiration for the splendid intellects that created
them.”

(8) ”After years of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient.
There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human
wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward
the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing — nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and
beyond everything of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the wars of the departed ages; of the
empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had
watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of
five thousand slow-revolving years . . .

The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs
over its story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing
memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when we shall stand at last
in the awful presence of God.”

(9)”WE passed the Fourth of July on board the Quaker City, in mid-ocean. It was in all respects a characteristic
Mediterranean day -- faultlessly beautiful. A cloudless sky; a refreshing summer wind; a radiant sunshine that
glinted cheerily from dancing wavelets instead of crested mountains of water; a sea beneath us that was so
wonderfully blue, so richly, brilliantly blue, that it overcame the dullest sensibilities with the spell of its
fascination.

They even have fine sunsets on the Mediterranean -- a thing that is certainly rare in most quarters of the
globe. The evening we sailed away from Gibraltar, that hard-featured rock was swimming in a creamy mist so
rich, so soft, so enchantingly vague and dreamy, that even the Oracle, that serene, that inspired, that
overpowering humbug, scorned the dinner gong and tarried to worship!”

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(10) ”We shall remember something of pleasant France; and something also of Paris, though it flashed upon us
a splendid meteor, and was gone again, we hardly knew how or where. We shall remember, always, how we saw
majestic Gibraltar glorified with the rich coloring of a Spanish sunset and swimming in a sea of rainbows. In
fancy we shall see Milan again, and her stately Cathedral with its marble wilderness of graceful spires. And
Padua -- Verona -- Como, jeweled with stars; and patrician Venice, afloat on her stagnant flood -- silent,
desolate, haughty -- scornful of her humbled state -- wrapping herself in memories of her lost fleets, of battle and
triumph, and all the pageantry of a glory that is departed.

We can not forget Florence -- Naples -- nor the foretaste of heaven that is in the delicious atmosphere of
Greece -- and surely not Athens and the broken temples of the Acropolis. Surely not venerable Rome -- nor the
green plain that compasses her round about, contrasting its brightness with her gray decay -- nor the ruined
arches that stand apart in the plain and clothe their looped and windowed raggedness with vines. We shall
remember St. Peter's: not as one sees it when he walks the streets of Rome and fancies all her domes are just
alike, but a s he sees it leagues away, when every meaner edifice has faded out of sight and that one dome looms
superbly up in the flush of sunset, full of dignity and grace, strongly outlined as a mountain.

We shall remember Constantinople and the Bosporus -- the colossal magnificence of Baalbec -- the Pyramids
of Egypt -- the prodigious form, the benignant countenance of the Sphynx -- Oriental Smyrna -- sacred
Jerusalem -- Damascus, the "Pearl of the East," the pride of Syria, the fabled Garden of Eden, the home of
princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on earth, the one city in all the world that has kept
its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have
risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten!”