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I wish I was as strong as either and had as healthy an appetite. As we sat on rock and ate cold meats and other horrible and indigestible matters, washed down by wine and water, we saw another party come after us, an old and ragged guide with two strange little figures of adventurous Frenchmen, clad in knickerbockers and carrying tourist's alpenstocks, bound for the Cima di Jazzi.
And then there was a little family contest as to the amount of travelling labour which fell to the lot of each of the party, during which I retired to one of the windows of the big front room in which we were sitting. And how much of this labour there is incidental to a tourist's pursuits! And how often these little contests do arise upon a journey! Who has ever travelled and not known them?
"Wild Wales" having been written from a tourist's note books is less flowing than "The Bible in Spain" and less delicate than "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye." A man is often called an "individual," the sun is called "the candle of God." A book just bought is "my late literary acquisition." Facts such as "I returned to Llangollen by nearly the same way by which I had come," abound.
In his Boston days he use to visit such collections of pictures as were accessible to him, and he knew sculpture somewhat through casts. Such cultivation, however, was at best a very limited and incomplete preparation, and did not preserve him from the tourist's weariness of galleries. He had wished in London that the Elgin marbles had all been reduced to lime.
To look at them is to set the blood racing! Speed is on the downs, glorious motion, odorous air of sea and herb, exquisite as in the isles of Greece. And the Continental travelling ninnies leave England for health! run off and forth from the downs to the steamboat, the railway, the steaming hotel, the tourist's shivering mountain-top, in search of sensations!
Then there is the peculiar satisfaction of catching now and then a drop of spray from, and hearing the thunder of, a cataract, whose free, surging bound is not yet shackled by the tourist's sentimental description; and the novelty of beholding one's image reflected in a liquid mirror whose geographical position is not yet stereotyped on the charts of man. Alas for these maps and charts!
Why he went this tour, unless for the pleasure and glory of describing it, Heaven knows! Clouds and darkness rest over the tourist's private history: but this, of course, renders his letters more piquant and interesting.
We have already spoken of Niagara as one of the wonders of the world, and one of the most sought-after beauty spots of America. We will now devote a few pages to a description of a far more remarkable natural wonder and to a phenomenon which, were it situated nearer the center of population, would have long since outclassed even Niagara as a tourist's Mecca.
As for the stick, Pécuchet freely adopted the tourist's stick, six feet high, with a long iron point. Bouvard preferred the walking-stick umbrella, or many-branched umbrella, the knob of which is removed in order to clasp on the silk, which is kept separately in a little bag.
To Mrs. Durham, with her gentle tourist's view of the European continent, as a vast Museum in which the human multitudes simply furnished the element of costume, the Boykins seemed abysmally instructed, and darkly expert in forbidden things; and her son, without sharing her simple faith in their omniscience, credited them with an ample supply of the kind of information of which he was in search.
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