For some time I have desired to travel over the United States--to ramble and observe and seek adventure here, at home, not as a tourist with a short vacation and a round-trip ticket, but as a kind of privateer with a roving commission. The more I have contemplated the possibility the more it has engaged me. For we Americans, though we are the most restless race in the world, with the possible exception of the Bedouins, almost never permit ourselves to travel, either at home or abroad, as the "guests of Chance." We always go from one place to another with a definite purpose. We never amble. On the boat, going to Europe, we talk of leisurely trips away from the "beaten track," but we never take them. After we land we rush about obsessed by "sights," seeing with the eyes of guides and thinking the "canned" thoughts of guidebooks. In order to accomplish such a trip as I had thought of I was even willing to write about it afterward. Therefore I went to see a publisher and suggested that he send me out upon my travels. I argued that Englishmen, from Dickens to Arnold Bennett, had "done" America; likewise Frenchmen and Germans. And we have traveled over there and written about them. But Americans who travel at home to write (or, as in my case, write to travel) almost always go in search of some specific thing: to find corruption and expose it, to visit certain places and describe them in detail, or to catch, exclusively, the comic side. For my part, I did not wish to go in search of anything specific. I merely wished to take things as they might come. And--speaking of taking things--I wished, above all else, to take a good companion, and I had him all picked out: a man whose drawings I admire almost as much as I admire his disposition; the one being who might endure my presence for some months, sharing with me his joys and sorrows and collars and cigars, and yet remain on speaking terms with me. The publisher agreed to all. Then I told my New York friends that I was going. [Illustration: I was moving about my room, my hands full of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and clothesbrushes and shaving brushes; my head full of railroad trains, and hills, and plains, and valleys] They were incredulous. That is the New York attitude of mind. Your "typical New Yorker" really thinks that any man who leaves Manhattan Island for any destination other than Europe or Palm Beach must be either a fool who leaves voluntarily or a criminal taken off by force. For the picturesque criminal he may be sorry, but for the fool he has scant pity. * * * * * At a farewell party which they gave us on the night before we left, one of my friends spoke, in an emotional moment, of accompanying us as far as Buffalo. He spoke of it as one might speak of going up to Baffin Land to see a friend off for the Pole.