To go the London rounds! To note the quite peculiar air Of courtesy, and everywhere The same unfailing public trust In manuscript that fetches just A thousand! not of thin Rupees, Nor Reis (which are Portuguese), Nor Rubles; but a thousand clear Of heavy, round, impressive, dear, Familiar English pounds!
Oh! England, who would leave thy shores-- Excuse me, but I see it bores A busy journalist To hear a rhapsody which he Could write without detaining me, So I will not insist. Only permit me once again To make it clearly understood That both those honourable men, Commander Sin and Captain Blood, Would swear to all that I have said, Were they alive; but they are dead!
[Illustration ** Portraits of our three travellers being viewed by two weeping men.]
Dialectical, unusual and archaic spellings have not been corrected. There are also a few spellings which appear to be poetic license. Two errors were corrected (the correction is in square brackets):
P. 24 But Blood belonged to ninty-four[ninety-four],
P. 44 Blood made an acurate[accurate] survey
As the transcriber, I feel moved to comment that I was somewhat offended by the implicit bigotry of the author towards Africans, however I took it as a sign of the times (when the poem was written) rather than intentional racial slurs.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Modern Traveller, by Hilaire Belloc