A Vagabond Journey Around the World: A Narrative of Personal Experience

More successfully than all other cities of its age and fame, Damascus has repulsed the advance of Western civilization and invention. To be sure, the whistle of the locomotive i...

“Now lads,” said our host, as we were finishing a late breakfast the next morning, “I’ll ’ave to ask you to move on. If I was fixed right you’d be welcome to ’ang out ’ere as lo...

Somewhat back from the wharves, yet within earshot of the cadenced song of stevedores and coal-heavers, stand two shaded bungalows, well-known among the inhabitants of the metro...

On a placid sea the _Warwickshire_ sped eastward, sighting the mountain ranges of Corsica and Sardinia, and sweeping through the straits of Messina so close to the Sicilian shor...

He who travels à force de bras may regulate his sight-seeing as exactly as the moneyed tourist by clinging to one fixed plan—to fall penniless and be forced to seek employment o...

Late that afternoon we were reunited at the Sailors’ Home. As time wore on the conviction grew that we must shake off Haywood once for all. Go where we would, he was ever at our...

Two hours after my arrival in Calcutta there entered the American consulate, high up above the Maidan, a white man who should have won the sympathy even of the hard-hearted mana...

On the eighteenth day of June, 1904, I boarded the ferry that plies between Detroit and the Canadian shore, and, coasting the sloping beach of verdant Belle Isle, swung off on t...

One fine morning, some two weeks after my introduction to Tom, I vacated my post in the consul’s household and set about laying plans for a journey up the Nile. My wages had not...

I acquiesced, and he jogged out along the strand driveway and halfway round the sparkling harbor. Near the top of one of the ridges on which Nagasaki is built he halted at the f...

Difficult, indeed, would it be to choose a more striking introduction to the wonderland of the Far East than that egg-shaped remnant left over from the building of India. How in...

The sun, rising red and clear next morning, put to rout even the protests of Nehmé and Shukry against my departure on Sunday. Elias sorrowfully said farewell at the mission gate...

There was next morning nothing to recall the dismal weather of the day before except the deep mud of the highway and my garments, still dripping wet when I drew them on. The vin...

It was well for my immediate peace of mind that no prophet accosted me on my way down to the harbor next morning, to foretell the hungry days that were to be my portion in Marse...

There was preaching and singing in the Sailors’ Home of Yokohama on the evening of my arrival. The white-bearded missionary styled the service a “mass meeting for Christ.” The b...

There are few stretches of roadway in Italy that wind through finer scenery than that panorama which spreads out along the highway between Florence and Siena. The pedestrian, ho...

The departure of Ole for home as a consul passenger, closely followed by that of Askins for India, “ere his elusive chips made their escape,” left me the oldest “comber” on the...

It was my good fortune to find employment the next morning. The job was suggestive of the spy and the tattle-tale, but the most indolent of vagabonds could not have dreamed of a...

The route to Bangkok, such as it was, lay on the eastern bank of the Menam. This time we crossed the stream by the official ferry, a dug-out canoe fully thirty feet long, which...

The month of August was drawing to a close when I swung my wardrobe of the city over a shoulder and, wandering down the Boulevard St. Germain, struck off to the southward. A suc...

The train rumbled into Colombo in the late afternoon. I made my way at once through the pattering throng to Almeida’s. In the roofless dining-room sat Askins, puffing furiously...

As the American “hobo” studies the folders of the railway lines, so the vagrant beyond seas scans the posters of the steamship companies. Few were the ships plying to the Far Ea...