Excerpt from Around the World: Or Travels in Polynesia, China, India, Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Other Heathen Countries

"Pilgrim footsteps, whither bound?
Pilgrim glances, whither bent?
Sandal shod and travel-gowned,
Lo, I seek the way they went."

Thoughts are etherealized forces preceding deeds. They are pointers rather than creators and far less potent than ideas.

A well-matured idea, allied to consciousness and purpose, original ting in Boston, may, regardless of oceans and mountains, time and space, reach, through vibration, Bombay, India, in the moment of its birth. Nations touching each other are nestling closer within each others arms. The world grows smaller each year and the principle of brotherhood grows larger.

Though girdling the globe so many times, as a worker, I am still on the road. To rest is to rust.

Why live in a world to dream and wonder? Why not see it in its matchless wonders? Why not encircle it again and again, crossing every ocean, scaling every mountain, drinking at every fountain, ransacking every library, pacing the stone doors of every temple, studying every religion, Brahman, Buddhist, Islam and Parsee, bringing lessons home to those who have neither the ambition nor the courage to brave the dissappointments and trials of travel.

Traveling is wonderfully instructive. It lengthens the shining links of friendship, it brightens the human affections, enlarges the social nature, enriches the intellectual faculties and teaches the lessons of a world-wide fraternity and so takes away every particle of personal self-conceit.

The author of this volume, rising above sect or creed, or the innate charms of nationality and above all preconceived concepts, has described whatever came under his individual observations with purposed fairness and impartiality, whether in civilized, semi-civilized and the heathen lands of the Orient.

What constitutes civilization is an unsettled question. What constitutes heathenism and where dwell the heathen so-called?

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