hey
could reach Liverpool for twenty-four dollars apiece.

At last they were actually afloat. "As the blue hills of Neversink
faded away, and sank with the sun behind the ocean, and I felt the
first swells of the Atlantic," he writes, "and the premonitions of
seasickness, my heart failed me for the first and last time. The
irrevocable step was taken; there was no possibility of retreat, and a
vague sense of doubt and alarm possessed me. Had I known anything of
the world, this feeling would have been more than momentary; but to my
ignorance and enthusiasm all things seemed possible, and the
thoughtless and happy confidence of youth soon returned."

The experiences of the next two years he has also told briefly and
tersely. "After landing in Liverpool," he says, "I spent three weeks
in a walk through Scotland and the north of England, and then traveled
through Belgium, and up the Rhine to Heidelberg, where I arrived in
September, 1844. The winter of 1844-45 I spent in Frankfurt on the
Main [in the family in which N.P. Willis's brother Richard was
boarding], and by May I was so good a German that I was often not
suspected of being a foreigner. I started off again on foot, a
knapsack on my back, and visited the Brocken, Leipsic, Dresden,
Prague, Vienna, Salzburg, and Munich, returning to Frankfurt in July.
A further walk over the Alps and through Northern Italy took me to
Florence, where I spent four months learning Italian. Thence I
wandered, still on foot, to Rome and Civita Vecchia, where I bought a
ticket as deck-passenger to Marseilles, and then tramped on to Paris
through the cold winter rains. I arrived there in February, 1846, and
returned to America after a stay of three months in Paris and London.
I had been abroad two years, and had supported myself entirely during
the whole time by my literary correspondence. The remuneration which I
received was in all $500, and only by continual economy and occasional
self-denial was I able to carry out my plan. I saw almost nothing of
intelligent European society; my wanderings led me among the common
people. But literature and art were nevertheless open to me, and a new
day had dawned in my life."

CHAPTER VII

THE HARDSHIP OF TRAMP TRAVEL

Making a journey without money, without knowing the language of the
people, and without any experience in travel is not at all the sort of
thing it seems to one who has not gone through its toils, but only
sees the glow and