’With silent worship of the great of old! 
  The dead but sceptered sovereigns who still rule
  Our spirits from their urns.’

* * * * *

HEMMING COTTON.

  ‘Hem them in!’ is the country’s cry;
  See how the bayonet needles fly! 
  Nothing neglect and nothing leave,
  Hem them in from the skirt to sleeve. 
  Little they reek of scratch or hurt
  Who toil at hemming the Southern shirt;
  Little they’ll care, as they shout aloud,
  If the Southern shirt prove a Southern shroud. 
  Hurrah for the needles sharp and thin! 
  Cotton is saved by hemming it in.’

* * * * *

ONE OF MY PREDECESSORS.

No books have quite the same fascination for me as the narratives of old travelers.  Give me a rainy day, a state of affairs which renders the performance of a more serious task impossible, and a volume of Hakluyt or Purchas, or even of Pinkerton’s agreeable collection, and I experience a condition of felicity which leaves Gray and his new novel far in the background.  For I thus not only behold again the familiar scenery of the earth,—­never forgetting a landscape that I have once seen,—­but I am also a living participant in the adventures of those who have wandered the same paths, hundreds of years before.  I visit Constantinople while the Porphyrogenite emperors still sit upon the throne of the East; I look upon the barbaric court of Muscovy before the name of Russia is known in the world; I make acquaintance with Genghis Khan at Karakorum, and with Aurungzebe at Delhi; I invade Japan with Kampfer, penetrate the Arctic Seas with Barentz, or view the gardens of Ispahan in the company of the gallant Sir John Chardin.

This taste was not the cause, but is the result, of my own experience.  My far-off, unknown Arab progenitor says, in one of his poems:  ’Fly thy home, and journey, if thou strivest for great deeds.  Five advantages thou wilt at least procure by traveling.  Thou wilt have pleasure and profit; thou wilt enlarge thy prospects, cultivate thyself, and acquire friends.  It is better to be dead, than, like an insect, to remain always chained to the same spot of earth.’  In the Middle Ages, and especially among the members of the enlightened Saracenic race, the instinct of travel was mainly an instinctive desire for education.  There was no other school of knowledge so complete and practical, in the dearth of books and the absence of other than commercial intercourse between the ends of the earth, I fancy that this instinct, skipping over some centuries, reappeared, in my case, in its original form; for it was not until after I had seen a large portion of the earth, that I became acquainted with the narratives of my predecessors, and recognized my kinship with them.  With the ghost of the mercantile Marco Polo, or those of the sharp fellows, Bernier and Tavernier, I do not anticipate much satisfaction, in the next world; but—­if they are not too far off—­I shall shake hands at once with the old monk Rubruquis, and the Knight Arnold von der Harff, and the far traveled son of the Atlas, Ibn Batuta.