AUTHOR OF "THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW" "GALLEGHER" "VAN BIBBER AND OTHERS" ETC. ILLUSTRATED NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 1894 Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers . All rights reserved. TO HON. EDWARD C. LITTLE EX-DIPLOMATIC-AGENT AND CONSUL-GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES TO EGYPT...

If you have always crossed the Atlantic in the spring-time or in the summer months, as do most tourists, you will find that leaving New York in the winter is more like a relief expedition to the north pole than the setting forth on a pleasure tour to the summer shores of the Mediterranean. There is no green grass on the hills of Staten Island, but there is, instead, a long field of ice stretching far up the Hudson River, and a wind that cuts into the face, and dashes the spray up over the tugboa

A great many thousand years ago Hercules built the mountain of Abyla and its twin mountain which we call Gibraltar. It was supposed to mark the limits of the unknown world, and it would seem from casual inspection, as I suggested in the last chapter, that it serves the same purpose to this day. Men have crept into Africa and crept out again, like flies over a ceiling, and they have gained much renown at Africa's expense for having done so. They have built little towns along its coasts, and run l

There are certain places and things with which the English novel has made us so familiar that it is not necessary for us to go far afield or to study guide-books in order to feel that we have known them intimately and always. We know Paddington Station as the place where the detective interrogates the porter who handled the luggage of the escaping criminal, and as the spot from which the governess takes her ticket for the country-house where she is to be persecuted by its mistress and loved by a

As a rule, when you visit the capital of a country for the first time it is sufficient that you should have studied the history of that particular country in order that you may properly appreciate the monuments and the show-places of its chief cities; it is not necessary that you should be an authority on the history of Norway and Sweden to understand Paris or New York. For a full appreciation of most of the great cities of the world one finds a single red-bound volume of Baedeker to be all-suff

When the visitor to Cairo first grasps the extent of his own ignorance of Egypt, and appreciates that if he is to understand its monuments and the signs of past times about him he must study the history of the whole world for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precipitately. Later, as a compromise, he proposes skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting his researches to the study of the political and social conditions of Egypt during the last ten years. And when he begins jauntily on this he

Perhaps the greatest charm of Athens and of the islands and mountains round about it lies in their power to lure back your belief in a great many fine people of whose remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical—of whose existence even you had begun to doubt. It is something very serious when one loses faith in so delightful a young man as Theseus, and it is worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete, where he killed the Minotaur, if for no other purpose than to have your admiration for him r

A little Italian steamer drew cautiously away from the Piræus when the waters of the bay were quite black and the quays looked like a row of foot-lights in front of the dark curtain of the night. She grazed the anchor chains of H. M. S. the Colossus , where that ship of war's broad white deck lay level with the water, as heavy and solid as a stone pier. She seemed to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom of the bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and clean as the decks, raised their