s
paltry attempt at wit, "you would see that the book is the object of my
travelling. I travel to write. I do not write because I have
travelled. I am not going to subordinate my book to my adventures. My
adventures are going to be arranged beforehand with a view to my book."

"A most original way of getting up a book!"

"Not in the least. It is the most common thing in the world. Look at
our dear British cousins."

"And see them make guys of themselves. They visit a magnificent
country that is trying the experiment of the world, and write about
their shaving-soap and their babies' nurses."

"Just where they are right. Just why I like the race, from Trollope
down. They give you something to take hold of. I tell you,
Halicarnassus, it is the personality of the writer, and not the nature
of the scenery or of the institutions, that makes the interest. It
stands to reason. If it were not so, one book would be all that ever
need be written, and that book would be a census report. For a
republic is a republic, and Niagara is Niagara forever; but tell how
you stood on the chain-bridge at Niagara--if there is one there--and
bought a cake of shaving-soap from a tribe of Indians at a fabulous
price, or how your baby jumped from the arms of the careless nurse into
the Falls, and immediately your own individuality is thrown around the
scenery, and it acquires a human interest. It is always five miles from
one place to another, but that is mere almanac and statistics. Let a
poet walk the five miles, and narrate his experience with birds and
bees and flowers and grasses and water and sky, and it becomes
literature. And let me tell you further, sir, a book of travels is
just as interesting as the person who writes it is interesting. It is
not the countries, but the persons, that are 'shown up.' You go to
France and write a dull book. I go to France and write a lively book.
But France is the same. The difference is in ourselves."

Halicarnassus glowered at me. I think I am not using strained or
extravagant language when I say that he glowered at me. Then he growled
out,--

"So your book of travels is just to put yourself into pickle."

"Say, rather," I answered, with sweet humility,--"say, rather, it is to
shrine myself in amber. As the insignificant fly, encompassed with
molten glory, passes into a crystallized immortality, his own
littleness uplifted into loveliness by the beauty in which he is
imprisoned