"Well, we're off!" we said simultaneously, smiling interrogatively at
each other.

"Yes! we're in for it."

So men start out manfully for the North Pole.

Our little enterprise gave us an imaginative realization of the
solidarity, the interdependence, of the world; and we saw, as in a
vision, its four corners knit together by a vast network of paths
connecting one with the other; footpaths, byways, cart-tracks,
bride-paths, lovers' lanes, highroads, all sensitively linked in one vast
nervous system of human communication. This field whose green sod we were
treading connected with another field, that with another, and that again
with another--all the way to New York--all the way to Cape Horn! No break
anywhere. All we had to do was to go on putting one foot before the
other, and we could arrive anywhere. So the worn old phrase, "All roads
lead to Rome," lit up with a new meaning, the meaning that had originally
made it. Yes! the loneliest of lovers' lanes, all silence and wild
flowers, was on the way to the Metropolitan Opera House; or, vice versa,
the Flat Iron Building was on the way to the depths of the forest.

"Suppose we stop here, Colin," I said, pointing to a solitary,
forgotten-looking little farmhouse, surrounded by giant wind-worn poplars
that looked older than America, "and ask the way to Versailles?"

"And I shouldn't be surprised," answered Colin, "if we struck some bright
little American schoolgirl who could tell us."

Although we as yet knew every foot of the ground we were treading, it