CHAPTER I.

For months the great pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land was
chatted about in the newspapers everywhere in America and discussed at
countless firesides. It was a novelty in the way of excursions--its like
had not been thought of before, and it compelled that interest which
attractive novelties always command. It was to be a picnic on a gigantic
scale. The participants in it, instead of freighting an ungainly steam
ferry--boat with youth and beauty and pies and doughnuts, and paddling up
some obscure creek to disembark upon a grassy lawn and wear themselves
out with a long summer day's laborious frolicking under the impression
that it was fun, were to sail away in a great steamship with flags flying
and cannon pealing, and take a royal holiday beyond the broad ocean in
many a strange clime and in many a land renowned in history! They were to
sail for months over the breezy Atlantic and the sunny Mediterranean;
they were to scamper about the decks by day, filling the ship with shouts
and laughter--or read novels and poetry in the shade of the smokestacks,
or watch for the jelly-fish and the nautilus over the side, and the
shark, the whale, and other strange monsters of the deep; and at night
they were to dance in the open air, on the upper deck, in the midst of a
ballroom that stretched from horizon to horizon, and was domed by the
bending heavens and lighted by no meaner lamps than the stars and the
magnificent moon--dance, and promenade, and smoke, and sing, and make
love, and search the skies for constellations that never associate with
the "Big Dipper" they were so tired of; and they were to see the ships of
twenty navies--the customs and costumes of twenty curious peoples--the
great cities of half a world--they were to hob-nob with nobility and hold
friendly converse with kings and princes, grand moguls, and the anointed