mercantile life.

From Alexandria I travelled to Cairo, where I intended to hire a
servant and a boat, for I wished to try the water-passage in preference
to the land. The cheapness of labor and food rendered it no difficult
matter to obtain my boat and provision it for a long voyage,--for how
long I did not tell the Egyptian servant whom I hired to attend me. A
certain feeling of fatality caused me to make no attempt at disguise,
although disguise was then much more necessary than it has been since:
I openly avowed my purpose of travelling on the Nile for pleasure, as a
private European. My accoutrements were simple and few. Arms, of
course, I carried, and the actual necessaries for subsistence; but I
entirely forgot to prepare for sketching, scientific surveys, etc. My
whole mind was possessed with one idea: to see, to discover;--plans for
turning my discoveries to account were totally foreign to my thoughts.

So, on the 6th of November, 1824, we set sail. I had been waiting three
years to arrive at this starting-point,--my whole life, indeed, had
been dumbly turning towards it,--yet now I commenced it with a coolness
and tranquillity far exceeding that I had possessed on many
comparatively trifling occasions. It is often so. We are borne along on
the current like drift-wood, and, spying jutting rocks or tremendous
cataracts ahead, fancy, "Here we shall be stranded, there buoyed up,
there dashed in pieces over those falls,"--but, for all that, we glide
over those threatened catastrophes in a very commonplace manner, and
are aware of what we have been passing only upon looking back at them.
So no one sees the great light shining from Heaven,--for the people are
blear-eyed, and Saul is blinded. But as I left Cairo in the greatening
distance, floating onward to the heart of the mysterious river, I
floated also into the twin current of thought, that, flowing full and