It is all over now; but when I look back, the idea of these venerable fossils skipping forth on a six months' picnic, seems exquisitely refreshing.

The advertised title of the expedition--"The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion" -- was a misnomer.

"The Grand Holy Land Funeral Procession" would have been better--much better.
Wherever we went, in Europe, Asia, or Africa, we made a sensation, and, I suppose I may add, created a famine.

None of us had ever been any where before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty to us, and we conducted ourselves in accordance with the natural instincts that were in us, and trammeled ourselves with no ceremonies, no conventionalities.

We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans--Americans! When we found that a good many foreigners had hardly ever heard of America, and that a good many more knew it only as a barbarous province away off somewhere, that had lately been at war with somebody, we pitied the ignorance of the Old World, but abated no jot of our importance.
Many and many a simple community in the Eastern hemisphere will remember for years the incursion of the strange horde in the year of our Lord 1867, that called themselves Americans, and seemed to imagine in some unaccountable way that they had a right to be proud of it.