To My Most Patient Reader and Most Charitable Critic, My Aged Mother, This Volume Is Affectionately Inscribed....

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...

For months the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at countless firesides. It was a novelty in the way of excur...

Occasionally, during the following month, I dropped in at 117 Wall Street to inquire how the repairing and refurnishing of the vessel was coming on, how additions to the passenger list were averaging,...

All day Sunday at anchor. The storm had gone down a great deal, but the sea had not. It was still piling its frothy hills high in air “outside,” as we could plainly see with the glasses. We could not ...

We plowed along bravely for a week or more, and without any conflict of jurisdiction among the captains worth mentioning. The passengers soon learned to accommodate themselves to their new circumstanc...

Taking it “by and large,” as the sailors say, we had a pleasant ten days’ run from New York to the Azores islands⁠—not a fast run, for the distance is only twenty-four hundred miles, but a right pleas...

I think the Azores must be very little known in America. Out of our whole ship’s company there was not a solitary individual who knew anything whatever about them. Some of the party, well read concern...

A week of buffeting a tempestuous and relentless sea; a week of seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely quarterdecks drenched with spray⁠—spray so ambitious that it even coated the smokestacks thic...

This is royal! Let those who went up through Spain make the best of it⁠—these dominions of the Emperor of Morocco suit our little party well enough. We have had enough of Spain at Gibraltar for the pr...

About the first adventure we had yesterday afternoon, after landing here, came near finishing that heedless Blucher. We had just mounted some mules and asses and started out under the guardianship of ...

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 radi...

We are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility. We are getting reconciled to halls and bedchambers with unhomelike stone floors and no carpets⁠—floors that ring to the tread of one’s heels with ...

We have come five hundred miles by rail through the heart of France. What a bewitching land it is! What a garden! Surely the leagues of bright green lawns are swept and brushed and watered every day a...

The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o’clock. We went to the commissionaire of the hotel⁠—I don’t know what a commissionaire is, but that is the man we went to⁠—and told him we wanted a guid...

We went to see the Cathedral of Notre Dame. We had heard of it before. It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are. We recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a m...

One of our pleasantest visits was to Père la Chaise, the national burying-ground of France, the honored resting-place of some of her greatest and best children, the last home of scores of illustrious ...

Versailles! It is wonderfully beautiful! You gaze and stare and try to understand that it is real, that it is on the earth, that it is not the Garden of Eden⁠—but your brain grows giddy, stupefied by ...

We had a pleasant journey of it seaward again. We found that for the three past nights our ship had been in a state of war. The first night the sailors of a British ship, being happy with grog, came d...

All day long we sped through a mountainous country whose peaks were bright with sunshine, whose hillsides were dotted with pretty villas sitting in the midst of gardens and shrubbery, and whose deep r...

“Do you wis zo haut can be?” That was what the guide asked when we were looking up at the bronze horses on the Arch of Peace. It meant, do you wish to go up there? I give it as a specimen of guide-Eng...

We left Milan by rail. The Cathedral six or seven miles behind us; vast, dreamy, bluish, snow-clad mountains twenty miles in front of us⁠—these were the accented points in the scenery. The more immedi...

We voyaged by steamer down the Lago di Lecco, through wild mountain scenery, and by hamlets and villas, and disembarked at the town of Lecco. They said it was two hours, by carriage to the ancient cit...

This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years; whose armies compelled the world’s applause whenever and wherever they battled; whose navies well ...

The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as a serpent. It is twenty or thirty feet long, and is narrow and deep, like a canoe; its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from t...

Some of the Quaker City’s passengers had arrived in Venice from Switzerland and other lands before we left there, and others were expected every day. We heard of no casualties among them, and no sickn...

There are a good many things about this Italy which I do not understand⁠—and more especially I can not understand how a bankrupt Government can have such palatial railroad depots and such marvels of t...

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where n...

So far, good. If any man has a right to feel proud of himself, and satisfied, surely it is I. For I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never ...

From the sanguinary sports of the Holy Inquisition; the slaughter of the Coliseum; and the dismal tombs of the Catacombs, I naturally pass to the picturesque horrors of the Capuchin Convent. We stoppe...

The ship is lying here in the harbor of Naples⁠—quarantined. She has been here several days and will remain several more. We that came by rail from Rome have escaped this misfortune. Of course no one ...

“See Naples and die.” Well, I do not know that one would necessarily die after merely seeing it, but to attempt to live there might turn out a little differently. To see Naples as we saw it in the ear...

They pronounce it Pom‑pay‑e. I always had an idea that you went down into Pompeii with torches, by the way of damp, dark stairways, just as you do in silver mines, and traversed gloomy tunnels with la...

Home, again! For the first time, in many weeks, the ship’s entire family met and shook hands on the quarterdeck. They had gathered from many points of the compass and from many lands, but not one was ...

From Athens all through the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, we saw little but forbidding seawalls and barren hills, sometimes surmounted by three or four graceful columns of some ancient temple, l...

Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be mora...

We left a dozen passengers in Constantinople, and sailed through the beautiful Bosporus and far up into the Black Sea. We left them in the clutches of the celebrated Turkish guide, “Faraway Moses,” wh...

We have got so far east, now⁠—a hundred and fifty-five degrees of longitude from San Francisco⁠—that my watch can not “keep the hang” of the time any more. It has grown discouraged, and stopped. I thi...

We anchored here at Yalta, Russia, two or three days ago. To me the place was a vision of the Sierras. The tall, gray mountains that back it, their sides bristling with pines⁠—cloven with ravines⁠—her...

We returned to Constantinople, and after a day or two spent in exhausting marches about the city and voyages up the Golden Horn in caïques, we steamed away again. We passed through the Sea of Marmora ...

We inquired, and learned that the lions of Smyrna consisted of the ruins of the ancient citadel, whose broken and prodigious battlements frown upon the city from a lofty hill just in the edge of the t...

This has been a stirring day. The Superintendent of the railway put a train at our disposal, and did us the further kindness of accompanying us to Ephesus and giving to us his watchful care. We brough...

When I last made a memorandum, we were at Ephesus. We are in Syria, now, encamped in the mountains of Lebanon. The interregnum has been long, both as to time and distance. We brought not a relic from ...

We are camped near Temnin-el-Foka⁠—a name which the boys have simplified a good deal, for the sake of convenience in spelling. They call it Jacksonville. It sounds a little strangely, here in the Vall...

We had a tedious ride of about five hours, in the sun, across the Valley of Lebanon. It proved to be not quite so much of a garden as it had seemed from the hillsides. It was a desert, weed-grown wast...

The next day was an outrage upon men and horses both. It was another thirteen-hour stretch (including an hour’s “nooning.”) It was over the barrenest chalk-hills and through the baldest canyons that e...

The last twenty-four hours we stayed in Damascus I lay prostrate with a violent attack of cholera, or cholera morbus, and therefore had a good chance and a good excuse to lie there on that wide divan ...

About an hour’s ride over a rough, rocky road, half flooded with water, and through a forest of oaks of Bashan, brought us to Dan. From a little mound here in the plain issues a broad stream of limpid...

We traversed some miles of desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds⁠—a silent, mournful expanse, wherein we saw only three persons⁠—Arabs, with nothing on but a lo...

Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy⁠—just the style of cities that have adorned th...

We took another swim in the Sea of Galilee at twilight yesterday, and another at sunrise this morning. We have not sailed, but three swims are equal to a sail, are they not? There were plenty of fish ...

We descended from Mount Tabor, crossed a deep ravine, followed a hilly, rocky road to Nazareth⁠—distant two hours. All distances in the East are measured by hours, not miles. A good horse will walk th...

Nazareth is wonderfully interesting because the town has an air about it of being precisely as Jesus left it, and one finds himself saying, all the time, “The boy Jesus has stood in this doorway⁠—has ...

The narrow canyon in which Nablous, or Shechem, is situated, is under high cultivation, and the soil is exceedingly black and fertile. It is well watered, and its affluent vegetation gains effect by c...

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is. The appearance of the city is peculia...

We were standing in a narrow street, by the Tower of Antonio. “On these stones that are crumbling away,” the guide said, “the Saviour sat and rested before taking up the cross. This is the beginning o...

We cast up the account. It footed up pretty fairly. There was nothing more at Jerusalem to be seen, except the traditional houses of Dives and Lazarus of the parable, the Tombs of the Kings, and those...

We visited all the holy places about Jerusalem which we had left unvisited when we journeyed to the Jordan and then, about three o’clock one afternoon, we fell into procession and marched out at the s...

It was worth a kingdom to be at sea again. It was a relief to drop all anxiety whatsoever⁠—all questions as to where we should go; how long we should stay; whether it were worth while to go or not; al...

The donkeys were all good, all handsome, all strong and in good condition, all fast and all willing to prove it. They were the best we had found anywhere, and the most “recherché.” I do not know what ...

We were at sea now, for a very long voyage⁠—we were to pass through the entire length of the Levant; through the entire length of the Mediterranean proper, also, and then cross the full width of the A...

Ten or eleven o’clock found us coming down to breakfast one morning in Cadiz. They told us the ship had been lying at anchor in the harbor two or three hours. It was time for us to bestir ourselves. T...

In this place I will print an article which I wrote for the New York Herald the night we arrived. I do it partly because my contract with my publishers makes it compulsory; partly because it is a prop...

Nearly one year has flown since this notable pilgrimage was ended; and as I sit here at home in San Francisco thinking, I am moved to confess that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion h...

They go on the principle that it is better than one innocent man should suffer than five hundred. ↩ July, 1867. ↩ Colonel J. Heron Foster, editor of a Pittsburgh journal, and a most estimable gentlema...