not conjured up an image of "fair
Bingen on the Rhine"? "_Fair_ Bingen!" cries Miss Kate contemptuously,
when we ask her memory of the place. "Why, Bingen is nothing--not
handsome, not picturesque, not poetic, not even clean. In fact, it is
the smelliest place on earth, except Cologne." So the traveller
modifies our stay-at-home impressions.

Again, we always notice signs of mental growth and widening in our
returned travellers. Besides, for a time they are less anxious over
details, less overcome by trivial mishaps; they have an agreeable
_aplomb_; they bring a certain refreshing atmosphere of leisure to our
round of careful routine. One palpable danger of the traveller is
becoming a slave to his guide-book, as some opera-goers are to the
libretto; he is verifying the assertions of his Murray, when he should
be seeing the landscape or the cathedral; he spends the time he has for
picture galleries in checking off the catalogue, as if hired to certify
that the alleged contents are there. Travellers who see only what the
books tell them to see bring us home no facts and opinions of value.

The earth has now been so tracked from pole to equator that the
traveller, to gain the world's attention, must see old things with new
eyes, or must ferret out new paths and places. Still, for a Stanley
and a Cameron mankind has immeasurable wonder; so has it for some
tremendous exploring sportsman like Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Cumming,
who takes only an ordinary paragraph to describe such an episode as the
crunching to death of his gun-bearer on a certain Indian "nullah,"
adding: "This was a sad termination to what had been a brief but
successful _chasse_--my bag during the trip consisting of seven tigers,
a panther, and a bear."

As to types of travellers, they have nearly all been drawn--the
irascible, the erratic, the English, the _nil admirari_, the
enthusiastic, and so on. Travelling is bad for some people, like Jack
Peters, who had his cards in Europe printed "Mr. Jacques Petersilli,"
pretending it to be easier for his European friends to get the hang of
that title, of which the "silly" part was all acquired across the sea.

The ex-Reverend Christopher Cheeseman, tutor and philosopher, is a
voyager of a sort perhaps destined to be more generally known among us.
He visits Europe as often as he can procure his passage and pocket
money in return for his valuable services as escort and adviser. He
arranges the preliminaries of p