Travel Books

THE LAND How many boys or girls, I wonder, ever turn to their school atlas for amusement, or try to picture to themselves what manner of countries those might be whose strange and unfamiliar place-names so often make their geography lesson a difficulty? Yet there are few subjects, I think, which might be made more interesting than geography, and a map may often serve to suggest delightful fancies to a... more...

LETTER XIX. May 19. Dear E.:— This letter I consecrate to you, because I know that the persons and things to be introduced into it will most particularly be appreciated by you. In your evening reading circles, Macaulay, Sidney Smith, and Milman have long been such familiar names that you will be glad to go with me over all the scenes of my morning breakfast at Sir Charles Trevelyan's yesterday.... more...

THE WESTERN TRAIL “An overland highway to the Western sea” was the thought variously expressed by many men in both public and private life among the French, English, and Americans from very early times. In 1659 Pierre Radisson and a companion, by way of the Great Lakes, Fox, and “Ouisconsing” Rivers, discovered the “east fork” of the “Great River” and crossed to the “west fork,” up... more...

CHAPTER I. Arrival of Jung Bahadoor in Ceylon—Voyage to Calcutta—Rifle practice on board the Atalanta—Rifle-shooting—Colonel Dhere Shum Shere—A journey along the Grand Trunk Road of Bengal—The experimental railway—The explosion at Benares. Towards the close of the year 1850 a considerable sensation was created in the usually quiet town of Colombo by the arrival in Ceylon of His Excellency... more...

JOURNAL OF A TOUR FROM DAMASCUS COUNTRIES OF THE LIBANUS, AND ANTI-LIBANUS. September 22, 1810.—I Left Damascus at four o'clock P.M. with a small caravan destined for Tripoli; passed Salehíe, and beyond it a Kubbe,[Kubbe, a cupola supported by columns or walls; the sepulchre of a reputed saint.] from whence I had, near sun-set, a most beautiful view of the city of Damascus and its... more...

Chapter I — A Great Transaction in Land The people of the young Republic of the United States were greatly astonished, in the summer of 1803, to learn that Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of France, had sold to us the vast tract of land known as the country of Louisiana. The details of this purchase were arranged in Paris (on the part of the United States) by Robert R. Livingston and James... more...

You probably know that it was a Queen of Spain, Isabella, who made it possible for America to be discovered in 1492. It was an Italian sailor, Christopher Columbus, who first had the strange new idea that he could sail westward from Spain in order to reach the Far East. He came to Spain to tell people about his idea, and everybody he met thought he was crazy because they knew, or thought they knew,... more...

INTRODUCTION. The evening before leaving for one of my periodical excursions, I was putting in order my guns, my insect-cases, and all my travelling necessaries, when my eldest son, a lad nine years old, came running to me in that wheedling manner—using that irresistible diplomacy of childhood which imposes on fathers and mothers so many troublesome treaties, and which children so well know how to... more...

FOREWORD That vast stretch of opal islands; jade continents; sapphire seas of strange sunsets; mysterious masses of brown-skinned humanity; brown-eyed, full-breasted, full-lipped and full-hipped women; which we call the Orient, can only be caught by the photographer's art in flash-light pictures. It is like a photograph taken in the night. It cannot be clear cut. It cannot have clean outlines. It... more...

CHAPTER I.   I was born September 17th, 1838, in the town of Penryn, County of Cornwall, England, and was educated at the national and private schools. When my education was sufficiently advanced, I was apprenticed to learn the trade of carpenter and joiner. My father was a paper-maker, and lived all his lifetime in the town. He was a strict teetotaler, and brought up his family, four boys and one... more...