The Project Gutenberg EBook of Saunterings, by Charles Dudley Warner

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Title: Saunterings

Author: Charles Dudley Warner

Last Updated: February 22, 2009
Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #3128]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAUNTERINGS ***

Produced by David Widger

SAUNTERINGS

By Charles Dudley Warner

MISAPPREHENSIONS CORRECTED

I should not like to ask an indulgent and idle public to saunter about
with me under a misapprehension. It would be more agreeable to invite it
to go nowhere than somewhere; for almost every one has been somewhere,
and has written about it. The only compromise I can suggest is, that we
shall go somewhere, and not learn anything about it. The instinct of the
public against any thing like information in a volume of this kind is
perfectly justifiable; and the reader will perhaps discover that this is
illy adapted for a text-book in schools, or for the use of competitive
candidates in the civil-service examinations.

Years ago, people used to saunter over the Atlantic, and spend weeks
in filling journals with their monotonous emotions. That is all
changed now, and there is a misapprehension that the Atlantic has been
practically subdued; but no one ever gets beyond the "rolling forties"
without having this impression corrected.

I confess to have been deceived about this Atlantic, the roughest and
windiest of oceans. If you look at it on the map, it does n't appear to
be much, and, indeed, it is spoken of as a ferry. What with the eight
and nine days' passages over it, and the laying of the cable, which
annihilates distance, I had the impression that its tedious three
thousand and odd miles had been, somehow, partly done away with; but
they are all there. When one has sailed a thousand miles due east and
finds that he is then nowhere in particular, but is still out, pitching
about on an uneasy sea, under an inconstant sky, and that a thousand
miles more will not make any perceptible change, he begins to have some
conception of the unconquerable ocean. Columbus rises in my estimation.

I was feeling uncomfortable that nothing had been done for the m