way, with the look one first gives to the crowd of faces in a ballroom,
my eye was caught by the pose of a province that stood out in graphic
mystery from the western coast. It made a striking figure there,
with its deep-bosomed bays and its bold headlands. Its name, it
appeared, was Noto; and the name too pleased me. I liked its vowel
color; I liked its consonant form, the liquid n and the decisive t.
Whimsically, if you please, it suggested both womanliness and will.
The more I looked the more I longed, until the desire carried me not
simply off my feet, but on to them.

Nobody seemed to know much about my inamorata. Indeed, those I asked
asked me, in their own want of information, why I went, and what
there was to see: of which questions, the second itself did for
answer to the first. Why not in fact have set my heart on going to
Noto just because it was not known! Not that it is well to believe
all the unseen to be much worth the seeing, but that I had an itching
sole to tread what others had not already effacingly betrodden.

Privately, I was delighted with the general lack of knowledge on the
subject. It served admirably to put me in conceit with my choice;
although I will own I was rather at a loss to account for it, and I
can only explain it now by the fact that the place was so out of the
way, and not very unlike others, after all. Being thus candid, I
ought perhaps to go a step farther and renounce the name. But, on
the two great principles that the pursuit is itself the prize and
that the means justifies the end, I prefer to keep it. For there was
much of interest to me by the way; and I cling to the name out of a
kind of loyalty to my own fancy. I like to think that Xenophon felt
as much in his Anabasis, though but one book out of seven deals with
the going up, the other six being occupied with the getting safely