_Lord Curryfin._ You have gone over a wide field, which we might exhaust a good bin of claret in fully discussing. But surely the facility of motion over the face of the earth and sea is both pleasant and profitable. We may now see the world with little expenditure of labour or time.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ You may be whisked over it, but you do not see it. You go from one great town to another, where manners and customs are not even now essentially different, and with this facility of intercourse become progressively less and less so. The intermediate country--which you never see, unless there is a show mountain, or waterfall, or ruin, for which there is a station, and to which you go as you would to any other exhibition--the intermediate country contains all that is really worth seeing, to enable you to judge of the various characteristics of men and the diversified objects of Nature.
_Lord Curryfin._ You can suspend your journey if you please, and see the intermediate country, if you prefer it.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ But who does prefer it? You travel round the world by a hand-book, as you do round an exhibition-room by a catalogue.
_Mr. MacBorrowdale._ Not to say that in the intermediate country you are punished by bad inns and bad wine; of which I confess myself intolerant. I knew an unfortunate French tourist, who had made the round of Switzerland, and had but one expression for every stage of his journey: _Mauvaise auberge!_
_Lord Curryfin._ Well, then, what say you to the electric telegraph, by which you converse at the distance of thousands of miles? Even across the Atlantic, as no doubt we shall yet do.
_Mr. Gryll._ Some of us have already heard the doctor's opinion on that subject.
_The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ I have no wish to expedite communication with the Americans. If we could apply the power of electrical repulsion to preserve us from ever hearing anything more of them, I should think that we had for once derived a benefit from science.
_Mr. Gryll._ Your love for the Americans, doctor, seems something like that of Cicero's friend Marius for the Greeks. He would not take the nearest road to his villa, because it was called the Greek Road.{ 1} Perhaps if your nearest way home were called the American Road, you would make a circuit to avoid it.