Reprinted Pieces by Charles Dickens
Scanned and proofed by David Price
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





Reprinted Pieces




THE LONG VOYAGE



WHEN the wind is blowing and the sleet or rain is driving against
the dark windows, I love to sit by the fire, thinking of what I
have read in books of voyage and travel. Such books have had a
strong fascination for my mind from my earliest childhood; and I
wonder it should have come to pass that I never have been round the
world, never have been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or
eaten.

Sitting on my ruddy hearth in the twilight of New Year's Eve, I
find incidents of travel rise around me from all the latitudes and
longitudes of the globe. They observe no order or sequence, but
appear and vanish as they will - 'come like shadows, so depart.'
Columbus, alone upon the sea with his disaffected crew, looks over