ter incessantly--"the
dirtiest city, too, and one of the most delightful." There is something
enviable to us desk-tethered mortals in these wide-striding rovers who
one week are in Copenhagen and the next in Constantinople. "Hang it,"
says Brown, coming down to breakfast in Brussels and finding that Smith
has gone, "I meant to bid Smith good-by, and forgot it. But I shall run
across him in Smyrna next month, and can do it then."

Before we have digested the Neapolitan missive of Augustus, and its
funny account of his fellow voyagers--how the men kissed all their male
friends at parting, as women do with us, and, after kissing, ran again
to the car windows to blow and throw last kisses--we see the traveller
in Toledo, and reeling off his diary to us in some such fashion as
this: "Here we find Burgos, formerly the capital of Castile and Leon,
showing signs of former greatness, but now fallen to decay. It has a
magnificent cathedral, a convent, and a nunnery, in which the people
seem to have spent all their money, the rest of the city being mostly
in ruins. Next we come to the Escurial, that vast pile, embracing
palace, monastery, and cathedral, with burying place for the reigning
kings. Leaving Madrid for a few moments, we will look at Toledo. Toledo
is one of the old cities of Spain, and was a place of some importance
when taken by the Romans, about 200 B.C. It had at one time 200,000
inhabitants; now but 17,000. What struck me so strangely was, why they
should build up such a city among these rocky hills, not a tree or
shrub to be seen outside the city, and very few inside," etc.

I quite like to read these travellers' letters, with their odd jumpings
from city to city and century to century. True, a man might girdle the
earth as many times as the Wandering Jew, without reaping a tithe of
the instruction that Xavier de Maistre got from his "Voyage Autour de
Ma Chambre"; and again, one untravelled, humorous pen made a small
Connecticut town more talked of than any other of its size in the
United States--I mean, of course, Danbury. Still, the exhilaration of
travel, and its habit of observation, do lend freshness to writing.
Then the returned traveller has a fund of new ideas for us
stay-at-homes, and his story is agreeable provided he does not
pronounce his French and German too abominably. He corrects our fancies
by his experience. Who does not know Mrs. Norton's "A soldier of the
Legion lay dying in Algiers," and has