In 1866 and 1867, I followed England round the world: everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one. The idea which in all the length of my travels has been at once my fellow and my guide—a key wherewith to unlock the hidden things of strange new lands—is a conception, however imperfect, of the grandeur of our race

    G R E A T E R   B R I T A I N. F ROM the bows of the steamer Saratoga , on the 20th June, 1866, I caught sight of the low works of Fort Monroe, as, threading her way between the sand-banks of Capes Charles and Henry, the ship pressed on, under sail and steam, to enter Chesapeake Bay. Our sudden arrival amid shoals of sharks and kingfish, the keeping watch for flocks of canvas-back ducks, gave us enough and to spare of idle work till we fully sighted the Yorktown peninsula, overgrown with anc

P ANAMA is a picturesque time-worn Spanish city, that rises abruptly from the sea in a confused pile of decaying bastions and decayed cathedrals, while a dense jungle of mangrove and bamboo threatens to bury it in rich greenery. The forest is filled with baboons and lizards of gigantic size, and is gay with the bright plumage of the toucans and macaws, while, within the walls, every housetop bears its living load of hideous turkey-buzzards, foul-winged and bloodshot-eyed. It was the rainy season

G R E A T E R   B R I T A I N. A T early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A boat which started from the ship at the same time as mine from the land, was upset, but in such shallow water that the passengers were saved, though they lost a portion of their baggage. As we flew toward the mail steamer, the Kaikoura , the harbor was one vast sheet of foam, and columns of spray were being whirled in the ai

A regular and uniform system of spelling of native names and other words has lately been brought into common use in India, and adopted by the government. Not without hesitation, I have decided upon ignoring this improvement, and confining myself to spellings known to and used by the English in England, for whom especially I am writing. I am aware that there is no system in the spelling, and that it is scientifically absurd; nevertheless, the new government spelling is not yet sufficiently well u