This page will be wafted possibly through a snow-storm to the reader's
hand; but it is written while a few red leaves are still clinging to
the maple bough, and the last steamer of the year from across the
ocean has not yet discharged on our shores the final cargo of
returning summer tourists. How glad they will be, like those who came
over in previous ships, to sight that fantomish, white strip of Yankee
land called Sandy Hook! It is thinking of them that I write.
[Footnote 59: From Chapter IX of "From Ponkapog to Pesth." Copyright,
1883, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Published by Houghton, Mifflin
Company.]
Some one--that anonymous person who is always saying the wisest and
most delightful things just as you are on the point of saying them
yourself--has remarked that one of the greatest pleasures of foreign
travel is to get home again. But no one--that irresponsible person
forever to blame in railway accidents, but whom, on the whole, I
vastly prefer to his garrulous relative quoted above--no one, I
repeat, has pointed out the composite nature of this pleasure, or
named the ingredient in it which gives the chief charm to this getting
back. It is pleasant to feel the pressure of friendly hands once more;
it is pleasant to pick up the threads of occupation which you dropt
abruptly, or perhaps neatly knotted together and carefully laid away,
just before you stept on board the steamer; it is very pleasant, when
the summer experience has been softened and sublimated by time, to sit
of a winter night by the cheery wood fire, or even at the register,
since one must make one's self comfortable in so humiliating a
fashion, and let your fancy wander back in the old footprints; to form
your thoughts into happy summer pilgrims, and dispatch them to Arles
or Nuremberg, or up the vine-clad heights of Monte Cassino, or embark
them at Vienna for a cruise down the swift Danube to Budapest. But in
none of these things lies the subtle charm I wish to indicate. It lies
in the refreshing, short-lived pleasure of being able to look at your
own land with the eyes of an alien; to see novelty blossoming on the
most commonplace and familiar stems; to have the old manner and the
threadbare old custom to present themselves to you as absolutely
new--or if not new, at least strange.
After you have escaped from the claws of the custom-house
officers--who are not nearly as affable birds as you once thought
them--and are rattling in an oddly familiar hack through well-known
but half-unrecognizable streets, you are struck by something comical
in the names on the shop signs--are American names comical, as
Englishmen seem to think?--by the strange fashion of the iron
lamp-post at the corner, by peculiarities in the architecture, which
you ought to have noticed, but never did notice until now. The candid
incivility of the coachman, who does not touch his hat to you, but
swears at you, has the vague charm of reminiscence. You regard him as
the guests regarded the poor relation at table in Lamb's essay; you
have an impression that you have seen him somewhere before. The truth
is, for the first time in your existence, you have a full,
unprejudiced look at the shell of the civilization from which you
emerged when you went abroad. Is it a pretty shell? Is it a
satisfactory shell? Not entirely. It has strange excrescences and
blotches on it. But it is a shell worth examining; it is the best you
can ever have; and it is expedient to study it very carefully the two
or three weeks immediately following your return to it, for your
privilege of doing so is of the briefest tenure. Some precious things
you do not lose, but your newly acquired vision fails you shortly.
Suddenly, while you are comparing, valuing, and criticizing, the old
scales fall over your eyes, you insensibly slip back into the
well-worn grooves, and behold all outward and most inward things in
nearly the same light as your untraveled neighbor, who has never known
"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome."
You will have to go abroad again to renew those magical spectacles
which enabled you for a few weeks to see your native land.