Nothing is more hopelessly wearisome than descriptions of travel;
even George Eliot could not make in her diaries Florence anything but
dull. I shall confine myself to sketching his route, to telling one
incident among the few he told me, and describing his return.

I had no more letters from him; but he has told me that he got to
Spitzbergen, and in a whaler to the edge of the great arctic
ice-field. He sailed to America and crossed it. From San Francisco he
visited Peru and the Amazon, on which river he spent a month. Then he
went to Africa, to what part I do not know, except that he came down
the Nile; and then he wandered through Asia Minor, Persia, and India;
he penetrated a little way into Thibet, and saw China and Japan; he
went up to the mouth of the Siberian rivers, travelling for three
months with a party of gipsies, who taught him many curious things,
such as their own language and freemasonry, the use of simples, the
properties of water, and the strange things that can be done with
even such things as docks and nettles, and other plants which we toss
away as weeds. He told me that in that branch of secret knowledge,
as in all others, there was a vast deal of nonsense but a solid
residuum of truth; and he said, half jestingly, that they had sworn
him a member of their brotherhood, and what was more, he had since
discovered many members of the brotherhood in civilized nations, even
in "kings' houses."

But I must suspend my account for a short time to relate the incident
to which I have just referred. It took place during his stay in
Teheran, while on his way home (1878), a period of about six weeks.
This city is situated in a lovely climate—hot, but not unbearable
for Europeans; houses, horses, and servants are extraordinarily