The Innocents Abroad II

And I will say, here, that I would rather travel with an excur­sion party of Methuselahs than have to be changing ships and comrades constantly, as people do who travel in the ordinary way. Those latter are always grieving over some other ship they have known and lost, and over other comrades whom diverg­ing routes have separated from them. They learn to love a ship just in time to change it for another, and they become attached to a pleasant traveling companion only to lose him. They have that most dismal experience of being in a strange vessel, among strange people who care nothing about them, and of undergoing the customary bullying by strange offi cers and the insolence of strange servants, repeated over and over again within the com­pass of every month. They have also that other misery of pack­ing and unpacking trunks – of running the distressing gaunt­let of custom-houses – of the anxieties attendant upon getting a mass of baggage from point to point on land in safety. I had rasher sail with a whole brigade of patriarchs than suffer so. We never packed our trunks but twice – when we sailed from New York, and when we returned to it. Whenever we made a land journey, we estimated how many days we should be gone and what amount of clothing we should need, fi gured it down to a mathematical nicety, packed a valise or two accordingly, and left the trunks on board. We chose our comrades from among our old, tried friends, and started. We were never dependent upon strangers for companionship. We often had occasion to pity Americans whom we found traveling drearily among strangers with no friends to exchange pains and pleasures with. Whenever

We shall remember something of pleasant France; and something also of Paris, though it fl ashed upon us a splendid meteor, and was gone again, we hardly knew how or where. We shall remember, always, how we saw majestic Gibraltar

We can not forget Florence – Naples – nor the foretaste of heaven that is in the delicious atmosphere of Greece – and sure­ly not Athens and the broken temples of the Acropolis. Surely not venerable Rome – nor the green plain that compasses her round about, contrasting its brightness with her gray decay – nor the ruined arches that stand apart in the plain and clothe their looped and windowed raggedness with vines. We shall remem­ber St. Peter’s: not as one sees it when he walks the streets of Rome and fancies all her domes are just alike, but as he sees it leagues away, when every meaner edifi ce has faded out of sight and that one dome looms superbly up in the fl ush of sunset, full of dignity and grace, strongly outlined as a mountain.