and I rushed into this Preface, which is no more
than an advertisement for readers.

What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua brought back from
Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces naught so
nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age when people
prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit.

I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative
point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp.
Although it runs to considerably upwards of two hundred pages, it
contains not a single reference to the imbecility of God's universe, nor
so much as a single hint that I could have made a better one myself.--I
really do not know where my head can have been. I seem to have forgotten
all that makes it glorious to be man.--'Tis an omission that renders the
book philosophically unimportant; but I am in hopes the eccentricity may
please in frivolous circles.

To the friend who accompanied me I owe many thanks already, indeed I
wish I owed him nothing else; but at this moment I feel towards him an
almost exaggerated tenderness. He, at least, will become my reader:--if
it were only to follow his own travels alongside of mine.

R. L. S.

AN INLAND VOYAGE

ANTWERP TO BOOM

We made a great stir in Antwerp Docks. A stevedore and a lot of dock
porters took up the two canoes, and ran with them for the slip. A crowd
of children followed cheering. The _Cigarette_ went off in a splash and
a bubble of small breaking water. Next moment the _Arethusa_ was after
her. A steamer was coming down, men on the paddle-box shouted hoarse
warnings, the stevedore and his porters were bawling from the quay. But
in a stroke or two the canoes were away out in the middle of the
Scheldt, and all steamers, and stevedores, and other long-shore vanities
were left behind.

The sun shone brightly; the tide was making--four jolly miles an hour;
the wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls. For my part, I had
never been in a canoe under sail in my life; and my first experiment out
in the middle of this big river was not made without some trepidation.
What would happen when the wind first caught my little canvas? I suppose
it was almost as trying a venture into the regions of the unknown as to
publish a first book, or to marry. But my doubts were not of long
duration; and in five minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I
had tied my sheet.

I own I was a little stru