I
amused myself by addressing the inhabitants, in the English language, with
an eloquent oration that soon gathered them under my control; and
thereafter I set a hundred of them at the pleasant task of trying to push
the train for Olympia on its way to take me to the Hermes of Praxiteles. I
knew no word of their language, nor did they of mine; but they understood
that that train should be started, if human force were sufficient to help
the cars upon their way: and finally, when the engine puffed and snorted
with a tardily awakened sense of duty, the train was cheered by the entire
population as I waved my hand from the rear platform and quoted one of
Daniel Webster's perorations.

* * * * *

Is it--I have often wondered--so difficult as people think, to be happy in
an hour "spent waiting at a railway junction"?... The kingdom of happiness
is within us; or else there is no truth in our assumption that the will of
man is free: and I am inclined to pity a man who, being happy in
Amalfi--the loveliest of all the places I have ever seen--cannot also
manage to be happy in Pyrgos--or in Essex Junction--and to communicate his
happiness to his responsive fellow-travelers.

The true enjoyment of traveling is to enjoy traveling; not to relish
merely the places you are going to, but to relish also the adventure of
the going. The most difficult train-journey I remember is the twenty-hour
trip from Lisbon to Sevilla, with a change of cars in the ghastly early
morning at the border-town of Badajoz and another change at noon at the
sun-baked, parched, and God-forsaken town of Merida; and yet I relish as
red letters on my personal map of Spain a pleasant quarrel over the price
of sandwiches at Badajoz and the way a muleteer of Merida flung a colored
cloak over his shoulder and posed for an unconscious moment like a
painting by Zuloaga.

And this philosophy has a deeper application to life at large: for all
life may be figured as a journey, and few there are who are natively
equipped for the enjoyment of all the waste and waiting places on the way.
The minds of most people are so fixed upon the storied capitals that are
featured in those works of fiction known as guidebooks that they are
impeded from enjoying the minor stations on their journey. "Hurry me to
Sevilla," cries the traveler--and misses the sight of my muleteer of
Merida. In America, our society is crammed with people who fail to enjoy
life