TELL THE TRUTH.
DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR OWN AFFAIRS.
CONFESS IGNORANCE.
TALK TO THE PERSON WHO TALKS TO YOU.
DO NOT UNDERRATE HIM.
BE SHORT.[1]
All the boys and girls agreed with Blanche, as, indeed, they are apt
to, for Blanche is as pleasant as she is sensible; and here are two
qualities which do not always travel together.
By this time almost all the “Alpine Club” had come. The waterproofs
were hung to drip and dry in the back hall, under Flora Haggerty’s
care; and in a great semicircle the young people sat round the hickory
fire. It was something about the “Stories of the Sea,” which had just
been published by Little & Brown, which started them on travels;
and how they would like to go to Tahiti and New Zealand and all the
wonderful places!
Uncle Fritz told them of some college friends of his, who had planned
landing in Arabia from Zanzibar, and then assuming Arab costumes,
talking such Arabic as they could, and gradually making their way
through Asia till they came out at Canton, on the eastern shore. They
failed in this great plan only from the merest accident at the start.
“We know, to this hour, curiously little of Central Asia,” he said.
“There are regions of which Marco Polo’s account is the only account we
have to this day; and that is six hundred years old.”
“And it was not true when it was new, was it?” asked Horace, laughing.
Uncle Fritz said that that was an old scandal. He said that Mandeville
and Marco Polo had long been called the princes of liars, while people
did not follow their example of travel; but in our times, their
reputations are waking up to light again. In Marco Polo’s case, he
wrote almost wholly from memory,--from the mere fact that he wrote long
after his return from the East; but later authorities have verified so
much of his narrative that it is but fair to believe him when nothing
can be proved against him.
Bertha confessed that she mixed him up very badly with Marco Paul, who
travelled in Mr. Abbott’s books.
They all laughed, because they knew what Bertha meant. “That was one
of Jacob Abbott’s quiet jokes. His books are wellnigh perfect in
everything, and in nothing more perfect than in the choice of names. So
he makes Marco Paul a traveller, on purpose that we may all remember
the prince of the travellers of the Middle Ages.”
Then Col. Ingham sent for the third volume of Irving’s “Columbus,” and
for Col. Yule’s careful edition of “Marco Polo,”--a fascinating book,
which should be in every public library. He told Bedford to go to the
bookcase which had Columbus’s bust on top, and look till he found them.
That is the case with the travels and geographies in it. Bedford knows
it as well as he knows the bookshelves he has at home, which he made on
his own work-bench in the laundry. Col. Ingham told Bedford he would
find an account of Marco Polo in the Appendix; and Bedford found it,
and read aloud:--