g continents, and using
steam as the motor of transportation on land and water all the way.

Making choice of three routes to the Orient, Carleton left Paris
December 9th, 1867, for Marseilles. He found much of the country
thitherward nearly as forbidding as the hardest regions of New
Hampshire. The climate was indeed easier than in the Granite State,
but from November to March the people suffered more from cold than the
Yankees. They lived in stone houses and fuel was dear. At Marseilles
the vessels were packed so closely in docks, that the masts and spars
reminded him of the slopes of the White Mountains after fire had swept
the foliage away. Although innumerable tons of grain were imported
here, he saw no elevators or labor saving appliances like those at
Buffalo, which can load or empty ships' holds in a few half hours.
Many of the imports were labelled "Service Militaire," and were for
the support of that army of eight hundred thousand men, which the
impoverished French people, even with a decreasing population, were so
heavily taxed to support. Carleton noticed that merchants of France
were planning to lay their hands on the East and win its trade.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THROUGH ORIENTAL LANDS.

It was "blowing great guns," and the sea was white with foam, when on
the ninety-eighth anniversary of Washington's birthday into another
world, December 14th, 1867, the steamer _Euphrates_, of the M. I.
Company, left Marseilles. The iron ship was staunch, though not
overclean. On the deck were boxed up eight carriages for Turks who had
been visiting Paris. The captain amused himself, in hours which ought
not to have been those of leisure, with embroidery. After a run
through the Sardinian straits, they had clear sea room to Sicily.
Stromboli was quiet, but Vesuvius was lively. At Messina they took on
coal, oranges, five Americans, and one Englishman. On learning
Carleton's plan to travel eastward to San Francisco, the Queen's
subject remarked, with surprise:

"There was a time when we Englishmen had the routes of travel pretty
much all to ourselves, but I'll be hanged if you Americans haven't
crowded us completely off the sidewalk. We can't tie your
shoe-strings."

Greece was sighted at sunrise. With Carleton's mental picture of the
great naval victory of Navarino, by which the murderous Turk was
driven off the sea, rose boyhood's remembrances of the fashionable
"Navarino bonnets," with their colossal flaring fr