The clerk’s remarks called up for me a charming picture. The old couple would decide on Egypt and the Holy Land for their winter cruise, and in the long, cold, winter evenings, seated at a table near, not a fireplace (I saw at a glance that their little parlor would not contain a fireplace) but one of those high, shining and most comfortable stoves with countless little isinglass windows and a soothing red glow behind them, they would read aloud, consult maps and pictures and time-tables and no doubt disagree very gently here and there as to the proper interpretation of certain passages in the Scriptures. And until the hour arrived for “locking up,” for refilling the stove, for seeing that the cat was comfortable for the night and for going to bed, they would actually be in Egypt or the Holy Land--much more so, as the clerk had shrewdly appreciated, than many of the sojourners at Shepheard’s Hotel, or the renters of steam dahabeahs on the Nile. It undoubtedly is one way of traveling, and by no means a bad way. In fact I once came across a little paper in the Contributor’s Club of the _Atlantic Monthly_ declaring it to be the best way. But then I am convinced that all the contributions to the Contributor’s Club of the _Atlantic Monthly_ are contributed by very cultivated and cozy, home-loving old maids. Books of travel and portfolios of well-taken photographs are the rails upon which the easy chair glides, the unknown sea upon which it so placidly sails. Everyone has made voyages of this kind and, while many of them are uneventful, some of them are thrilling. The most memorable one (not counting books of adventure which in this connection don’t count at all) I ever took was long ago to the Island of Barbados. We were in college at the time and one of the requirements of the advanced English course we were studying was that everybody should write a story in seven chapters--plot, locality and treatment being left to our own discretion. The scene of my narrative (it makes me blush when I recall that little masterpiece of fiction) was in and about Boston, and one bitterly cold sleeting afternoon I asked a friend of mine what he was going to write about. We were in his study at the time and, as he was absorbed at his desk in working out an architectural problem, he merely muttered, with his nose wrinkled up, “Barbados.” “What are they?” I inquired. “It isn’t they, it’s it,” he replied; “it’s an island.” “Where is it?” I asked. “I really don’t know,” he said. “But how can you write about it if you don’t know anything about it?” I pursued. “Why, doesn’t the mere name convey everything to you?” he demanded. “It conveys,” I told him, “some sort of vegetable. _Do_ help yourself to some more of the barbados,” I added.