"A most original way of getting up a book!"

"Not in the least. It is the most common thing in the world.
Look at our dear British cousins."

"And see them make guys of themselves. They visit a magnificent
country that is trying the experiment of the world, and write
about their shaving-soap and their babies' nurses."

"Just where they are right. Just why I like the race, from
Trollope down. They give you something to take hold of. I
tell you, Halicarnassus, it is the personality of the writer,
and not the nature of the scenery or of the institutions, that
makes the interest. It stands to reason. If it were not so,
one book would be all that ever need be written, and that book
would be a census report. For a republic is a republic, and
Niagara is Niagara forever; but tell how you stood on the
chain-bridge at Niagara--if there is one there--and bought a
cake of shaving-soap from a tribe of Indians at a fabulous
price, or how your baby jumped from the arms of the careless
nurse into the Falls, and immediately your own individuality
is thrown around the scenery, and it acquires a human interest.
It is always five miles from one place to another, but that is
mere almanac and statistics. Let a poet walk the five miles,
and narrate his experience with birds and bees and flowers and
grasses and water and sky, and it becomes literature. And let
me tell you further, sir, a book of travels is just as
interesting as the person who writes it is interesting. It is
not the countries, but the persons, that are 'shown up.' You
go to France and write a dull book. I go to France and write