WHEN the wind is blowing and the sleet¹ or rain is driving against the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel. Such books have had a strong fascination² for my mind from my earliest childhood; and I wonder it should have come to pass that I never have been round the world, never have been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten.

Sitting on my ruddy hearth⁶ in the twilight⁷ of New Year’s Eve, I find incidents of travel rise around me from all the latitudes⁸ and longitudes⁹ of the globe. They observe no order or sequence, but appear and vanish as they will — ‘come like shadows, so depart.’ Columbus, alone upon the sea with his disaffected¹⁰ crew, looks over the waste of waters from his high station on the poop of his ship, and sees the first uncertain glimmer¹² of the light, ‘rising and falling with the waves, like a torch in the bark of some fisherman,’ which is the shining star of a new world. Bruce is caged in Abyssinia, surrounded by the gory¹³ horrors which shall often startle him out of his sleep at home when years have passed away. Franklin, come to the end of his unhappy overland journey — would that it had been his last! — lies perishing of hunger with his brave companions: each emaciated¹⁴ figure stretched upon its miserable¹⁵ bed without the power to rise: all, dividing the weary days between their prayers, their remembrances of the dear ones at home, and conversation on the pleasures of eating; the last-named topic being ever present to them, likewise, in their dreams. All the African travellers, wayworn,

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