On Traveling Again: The "Deposit" System

FELLOW TRAVELERS are proverbialty confidential, I believe ; and when the genial globe-trotters of the January and March Contributors’ Club took us into their confidence, we were at once minded to reciprocate.

We are dwellers in a little Western college town, Joan and I. From the eastern rim, where the sun peeps up o’ mornings, to the western edge, “where the quiet coloured end of evening smiles, ” there is no hint that the world is anything else but prairie. The very vastness of the distances shuts us in the more effectually. A mountain we could climb, with faith that some Pacific would yield us the tramontane vision granted to Cortes of old time. But the prairie is no respecter of pedestrians, and a day’s journey leaves the rim of the cup as far away as ever.

And down here, in the centre of this unlimited nothingness, we caught, not so long ago, the bacillus of the Grand Tour. Perhaps it was a nonchalant comment on Paris bookshops, made by one of our traveled college friends, that introduced the germ into our system. Perhaps it was a passing reference to a tramp in Switzerland that set the minute particle in motion. But certain it is that a letter from a friend of our youth, whom fate had just taken on a trip through the Riviera, aroused the bacillus of the G. T. to feverish activity.

“Darby,” said Joan to me when the letter came, “let us go to Europe.”

“Done, ” said I. And the very next day a deposit went into the savings bank, — a deposit between the lines of which we could read, “Ticket to New York.”

Hardly had the deposit slip been made out before the smooth prairie rose into a serrated line of buildings, and we were walking down Broadway. “How easy it was,” quoth Joan, to whom Pullman cars are bugbears indescribable. “Shall we not stay in New York awhile? ” And stay we did for two months, until “Passage to Liverpool ” followed “New York” through the cashier’s window. What did it matter that off there, on the wintry Atlantic coast, the Noordland was staggering in with ice-covered rigging and broken steering gear? We had made the voyage without turning a hair, and the hand of the customs officer was as powerless to delay us at Liverpool as the hand of Providence had been on the voyage.

We are in London now, — just at present happily ensconced in the library of the British Museum. “ Paris ” has not yet been deposited with the cashier; “Switzerland” is still a little hazy; and as for “Italy ” —well, we content ourselves with opening our Browning at De Gustibus. But in due time Italy, too, will pass into the custody of the guardian of our travels, and our itinerary will be complete.

And then — let me whisper it in your ear — we shall probably settle down to such a pleasant satisfaction in our journeyings that the prairies will blossom anew to our eyes, and Joan will say contentedly, “ Darby, shall we stay at home and send the boy ? ”