An
imagination so easily excited as mine could not have escaped
disappointment if it had had ample opportunity and experience of the
lands it so longed to see. Therefore, although I made the India
voyage, I have never been a traveller, and saving the little time I
was ashore in India, I did not lose the sense of novelty and romance,
which the first sight of foreign lands inspires.
That little time was all my foreign travel. I am glad of it. I see now
that I should never have found the country from which the East
Indiaman of my early days arrived. The palm groves do not grow with
which that hand laid upon the ship placed me in magic conception. As
for the lovely Indian maid whom the palmy arches bowered, she has long
since clasped some native lover to her bosom, and, ripened into mild
maternity, how should I know her now?
"You would find her quite as easily now as then," says my Prue, when I
speak of it. She is right again, as usual, that precious woman; and
it is therefore I feel that if the chances of life have moored me fast
to a book-keeper's desk, they have left all the lands I longed to see
fairer and fresher in my mind than they could ever be in my
memory.
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