To write well of one’s travels, however, requires more than mere personal enjoyment, which so often ends in half articulate ejaculations of pleasure; it requires a gift for seizing upon the essential characteristics of any place, and a power of comparison and contrast that will enable one to convey his observations to another. Some people lack this ability; “They are,” says William McFee, “with agreeable reservations, very much like those seafarers who sail all over the world and tarry in magic harbors and beneath the glittering cupolas of marvelous cities and come home and say there is nothing in the world to see. They possess admirably incondite minds set upon trade and concessions and the women whose photographs adorn their dressing tables.” Once as a child on the treeless, drought burned prairies, I begged a neighbor to tell me of her girlhood on the rocky fjords of Norway under the midnight sun, and she answered, “Oh, it was just about like here.” A good traveler appreciates the innate character of a place as a good biographer does that of a person, and strives by every means within his power to set it forth, and so give to his reader a refreshing sense of a sojourn among new scenes and new faces. “It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But presently you feel that you will die Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done, An’ turn another--likely not so good But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.” The following suggestions may be helpful: 1. Choose a place which is of interest to you for one definite characteristic: natural beauty, historical associations, picturesque squalor, or what you will. Make this point of central interest in your narrative, but do not neglect other possible additions. Observe that Mr. Morley’s “Up the Wissahickon” gives many other items of interest besides the picture of autumn beauty. 2. Limit your narrative to a period brief enough to be readily presented within the limits of your space. Though you may have known a place all your life, an account of a single visit may be a wise selection. A supposed traveler’s story of a day in your home town or city may reveal unexpected possibilities. 3. Write of pleasant experiences or in a kindly mood. Do not chronicle the trip you wish you had never taken. F. del P. THE DEPARTURE JULIAN STREET My last days in Japan were my best days, for I spent them in a Japanese home, standing amid its own lovely gardens in Mita, a residential district some twenty minutes by motor from the central part of Tokyo. Through the open shoji of my bedroom I could look out in the mornings to where, beyond the velvet lawns, the flowers and the treetops, the inverted fan of Fuji’s cone was often to be seen floating white and spectral in the sky, seventy miles away.