on the people's lips-it is this that keeps the fascination always fresh. And what is there full of more pleasurable excitement than to stumble through a foreign language while our knowledge of it is still in its pristine simplicity and we see the pages of the grammar flittering before our eyes as we disengage a laboring sentence from our unwilling tongue? To watch the stolid face of the victim of our endeavors dawn with awakening consciousness, until at last understanding creeps like the rising sun into his eyes-and he agrees eagerly with something that has not the remotest connection with what we were attempting to say-can there be anything so delightful, so charmingly hazardous? It is a joy to a man's gambling spirit to be abroad-to be really abroad, not merely to travel from one tourist-filled caravanserai to the other, helped into the train by one genial hotel-agent, and out by another. It is a joy to live for a while by one's wits, to have one's meal depend on one's vocabulary, and if it contains nothing more than omelette and pomme de terre, to live or die by those. Ah, but it is difficult these days! That irrepressible English language is sure to burst upon you in the most unexpected corners of the world and freeze your young blood in what you fondly supposed was the unadulterated atmosphere of abroad. Unless you find the magic spot I am looking for, good reader, you are nowhere safe from the intrusion of your mother tongue. You may think that you have reached the very heart of Barbary and be accosted by a head-waiter who speaks better English than you do, and be fawned upon by his minions in every variety of Cockney. What a glow of pride comes over us when we contemplate our "modern improvements!" How we inflate our chests at the thought that it is our age that is working such wonders! How complacent it makes us to realize how the world is contracting under our nimble fingers, how near the ends of the earth are drawing to each other! An admirable condition of things, of course, this progress we talk so much about, particularly for our commercial friends who never stir from the exchanges. But for us that wander it is a sad state of affairs at best. For, after all, what are the railroads and the steamships, advertised so widely as "lightning-like in speed and palatial in furnishings" to us? When all is said, is not the straight white road with the green fields and the waving Lombardy poplars on either side the best highway for the wanderer? And a stately brigantine with sails full and billowy will cross the Atlantic if you give her time. I care not to see new things eternally, or far-away places. I merely want to be abroad, to feel the irresponsibility that lies in an atmosphere where nothing reminds me of home duties and of home cares. For, as the once roistering, but now sadly dejollified King Harry remarks, 'Tis known That men are merriest when they are from home. I want for the time to live another man's life, to do what the Romans do, to eat what the Romans eat, or even the Neapolitans, if they'll let me off with maccheroni, to stumble through another man's language, to jest with the peasant-women-and there are pretty ones here and there if your eye is watchful to espy them—in a tongue less blatant and serious than the King's English. It is that that I travel for. Alas, how little there is of it! We want to be abroad, and instead, we travel about as it were on a magic Birmingham carpet that takes us everywhere, and gives us the feeling that wherever we may be, we are in a corner, though perhaps a neglected one, of the British Empire. Wherever we go we speak English, and if we are not understood, not we are the fools, but those that are so backward in civilization as not to understand the Great Tongue. Who need learn Esperanto if he know English? Surely and steadily his almightyness, the English shop-keeper, is spreading himself, and surely and steadily the world is becoming smaller. Everything is tending toward contraction. The steamships and railroads are competing with the wind for swiftness, everywhere-be it London or Port Said or Shanghai-connections are quicker and more certain. Civilization seems bound to root out from mankind that charming sensation of being abroad. How busy the engineers are! In a short time someone will have conquered the marshes in central Africa and trains will rush from Cairo to the Cape as they do to-day from New York to the new San Francisco. A bridge will span Gibraltar, a tunnel will bore through the English Channel. We shall go from London or St. Petersburg to the world's end in ten days with no change of cars. And undoubtedly when we get there, a beaming white or yellow or brown or black man with the word "Porter" blazoned on a red sweater will relieve us of our bags and direct us to the Hotel d'Angleterre. Sad, is it not, good reader, you, who love to be abroad as much as I? But there is no help for it. Let us make up our minds, then, that when the time comes we shall steal off in vacation time to the desert somewhere the Sahara will do if the English, who are so busy about Egypt haven't irrigated it and set up factories and "palatial" hotelsand trusting our weary souls to the sage and cynical camel betake ourselves into some distant oasis. There perhaps for a space we may feel that we are abroad. But progress, that relentless Juggernaut, will leave us not even that haven of refuge. One fine Spring morning we shall awake, and throwing open the window, hail one of the rapidly passing flying machines. Then, indeed, nought will be sacred to the eternal tourist. Over our most secluded spots we shall see him whirl. His Hotel Victorias, his d'Angleterres, his Schweizerhofs will rise like mushrooms on plain and hill. The Matterhorn will no longer be foreign soil, nor will the Himalayas remain unconquered. Like a cloud will he and his fellows spread over the earth, a pitchy cloud Of locusts, warping on the eastern wind. When that time comes, good reader, may my bones be dust. Or if that be not my fortune, may the gods supply me generously enough with the goods of this life that I may build me a little astronomical observatory in my garden, and there, in the silences of the night, seek out some still and unknown star; where, passing like a shadow from this touristladen and all too civilized world, I may once more enjoy the sensation of being abroad. Arminius. THE LOST LAND. There is wild tumult in the west and voices calling The old barbaric voices, calling, that will not rest; Therefore my heart is glad, I am strong, I shout with the west And follow with laughter where the leaves are falling. The dun cattle roam where the wind bows down the grass, The swallows leap on the wind, and shift and follow and stray Over the long dunes, to the land of the heart, far away, Calling; and in my veins a voice cries out where they pass. I remember the house, the sorrow long ago, In the first widening dawn of the world, the quiet face Lost, ere the first sea song, or the wind; the lonely place Beyond the white-capped sea where the winds and waters go. Therefore, I, too, am glad, I shout aloud with the earth. I am made one with his winds and waves, and in my breast The old-world desire, the self-same mystic birth. I will shout on the hills, laugh where the days depart. Beyond the long, grey clouds the winds walk in the west, The dun cattle pause with strained out throats and stray, Where the swallows leap on the wind, and turn and follow away Calling, calling-O, the voices will leave no rest! I will laugh on the hills, gird myself up for my race— Yea thou art very fair, thou art strong-but O earth, O my mother, The cry deep in the heart, not all the years can smother, The old, strange pang, the voices, the lost place! John Hall Wheelock. THE A B C'S OF DIARISM. Later in life he judged the diarizing reasonably, with a trace of his old formalism. "Through a critical period it kept me from worse mischief. The soul of a disillusioned youth, still warm from the embrace of religion and sentimental egoism forever departed, holding aloof a little contemptuously from humble goals and ties, must needs soon shiver in the cold of unreality. Then beware, lest it plunge, frozen firm, into the fatally hardening sensational vapor. Ideals, ideals, let him find an ideal, and the world will seem more warm and real to him. Some men find a goddess, some few a God, some a hero; warmth-giving bodies those, surely. Yet Truth and Beauty are no less living; at whose altars I knelt till the danger was past; unheedingly, I grant, blunderingly, for such is youth, an extremist. Art, science, the constructive may not encroach on the real; to keep my engagements would have been better than to keep three diaries; but credit them this, they were once to me the realest of realities." |