The Thames, the Danube, and the Rhine still roll their
course, Mont Blanc stands firm with its snow-capped summit,
and the Northern Lights gleam over the land of the North; but
generation after generation has become dust, whole rows of the
mighty of the moment are forgotten, like those who already
slumber under the hill on which the rich trader, whose ground
it is, has built a bench, on which he can sit and look out
across his waving corn fields.

    “To Europe!” cry the young sons of America; “to the land
of our ancestors, the glorious land of monuments and fancy- to
Europe!”

    The ship of the air comes. It is crowded with passengers,
for the transit is quicker than by sea. The electro-magnetic
wire under the ocean has already telegraphed the number of the
aerial caravan. Europe is in sight. It is the coast of Ireland
that they see, but the passengers are still asleep; they will
not be called till they are exactly over England. There they
will first step on European shore, in the land of Shakespeare,
as the educated call it; in the land of politics, the land of
machines, as it is called by others.

    Here they stay a whole day. That is all the time the busy
race can devote to the whole of England and Scotland. Then the
journey is continued through the tunnel under the English
Channel, to France, the land of Charlemagne and Napoleon.
Moliere is named, the learned men talk of the classic school
of remote antiquity. There is rejoicing and shouting for the
names of heroes, poets, and men of science, whom our time does
not know, but who will be born after our time in Paris, the
centre of Europe, and elsewhere.

    The air steamboat flies over the country whence Columbus
went forth, where Cortez was born, and where Calderon sang
dramas in sounding verse. Beautiful black-eyed women live
still in the blooming valleys, and the oldest songs speak of
the Cid and the Alhambra.

    Then through the air, over the sea, to Italy, where once
lay old, everlasting Rome. It has vanished! The Campagna lies
desert. A single ruined wall is shown as the remains of St.
Peter’s, but there is a doubt if this ruin be genuine.

    Next to Greece, to sleep a night in the grand hotel at the
top of Mount Olympus, to say that they have been there; and
the journey is continued to the Bosphorus, to rest there a few
hours, and see the place where Byzantium lay; and where the
legend tells that the harem stood in the time of the Turks,
poor fishermen are now spreading their nets.

    Over the remains of mighty cities on the broad Danube,
cities which we in our time know not, the travellers pass; but
here and there, on the rich sites of those that time shall
bring forth, the caravan sometimes descends, and departs
thence again.

    Down below lies Germany, that was once covered with a
close net of railway and canals, the region where Luther
spoke, where Goethe sang, and Mozart once held the sceptre of
harmony. Great names shine there, in science and in art, names
that are unknown to us. One day devoted to seeing Germany, and
one for the North, the country of Oersted and Linnaeus, and
for Norway, the land of the old heroes and the young Normans.
Iceland is visited on the journey home. The geysers burn no
more, Hecla is an extinct volcano, but the rocky island is
still fixed in the midst of the foaming sea, a continual
monument of legend and poetry.

    “There is really a great deal to be seen in Europe,” says
the young American, “and we have seen it in a week, according
to the directions of the great traveller” (and here he
mentions the name of one of his contemporaries) “in his
celebrated work, ‘How to See All Europe in a Week.’”

                            THE END