"And must I really explain my observation to a lad about entering the High School?" cried his uncle reproachfully. "I'll warrant Bess knows—and somebody else, too!" catching the gleam in Hope's eye.
"Oh, yes, I understand, in a way," returned Bess. "Let's see, Charles
Lamb, the writer, was very fond of roast pig, wasn't he?"
"Was he, Miss Hope?"
"Yes, sir, and wrote an essay upon it which has become a classic."
"Oh, of course! I'd almost forgotten that," put in Bess, hastily.
"And I'm free to confess I never knew it," added her brother. "Fact is, I begin to think I didn't learn much in school, anyhow—that is, much that I've needed since. I've picked up more about geography and history on this trip than all I ever learned there."
"No, no, not quite that, my boy! You simply have digested what then you only swallowed. Don't you know what Channing says—'It is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections—we must chew them over again'? The fact is, nothing can ever be quite learned until it is experienced. I may be taught from a book that water expands in freezing, but I cannot realize that fact till I, sometime, leave water in a pitcher and find it broken next morning. Then I know, in a way never to be forgotten, about this scientific truth. So it is in geography; we have always taken in certain facts regarding the relative positions of land and water, mountain and plain, but if we had attempted to go anywhere, with absolutely no guide but memory, nine out of ten of us would be lost on the first stage of the journey. You are now simply assimilating what you learned at school, and making the facts, which you took on trust then, part and parcel of your actual experience now. It seems to me one of the best ways to study geography at home is to travel on paper. That comes nearest the real thing. Map out a route, buy your tickets (in imagination), take your conveyance, and on the way see everything possible to be gleaned from those eyes which have gone before, and left a record of their impressions. Try and think if you would see in the same way, and what else might be observed by quick eyes, natural to occur in that part of the globe. If one has imagination he may almost believe, in time, that he has really visited the places so studied.
"I knew a young fellow, once, who lived in an insignificant town in Vermont, and had never been fifty miles from home, yet who kept up such journeys for years, and many a time, in talking with him, I, the real traveler, would learn facts about certain localities where I had been, from him who never set foot near them. Just to prove him, once, I said, 'Are you acquainted with Salt Lake City?' 'Pretty well,' he answered modestly. Having spent a summer or two there, myself, I thought I would try and trip him up, so said, carelessly, 'When I stood in front of Brigham Young's Square and looked at that great town on my left'—but there he interrupted me, quick as a flash, 'You mean looked down upon the town at your right, don't you? Brigham's Square is on what is called the North Bench, and standing before it you must overlook the larger part of the city lying upon your right.' Of course this was correct, and I had to acknowledge that he really knew as much about many localities as I, who had visited them. But he was unusual."
"Well," said Dwight slowly, "what I have to complain of about travelers is that they don't tell the little things—the details, you know. I suppose it seems silly to them to say whether they went on board a steamer in a boat, or across a gangway, or up a flight of steps, or to describe just how a car looks when they travel by rail, but I used to wish they would. And when I write my book of travels I'm going to!"
"I would," said his sister encouragingly.