The Retrospect by Ada Cambridge — Read

There are people, and they seem to me the vast majority, who have no curiosity about or interest in anything or anywhere outside their business and domestic boundaries; who "wouldn't cross the street," as they say, to look at the Parthenon or the Sphinx, or see anything in them if they did; to whom a guide-book, with photographs, means a map and a railway time-table and an indicator of the tariffs of different hotels. But the passion for travel -- to "see the world" -- has possessed me from my youth up. It has grown with my growth, and has not waned with the waning years. As long as the faculties of vision and locomotion remain to me, I shall cherish dreams of the Sphinx and the Parthenon, Venice, the Swiss Alps, the castles of the Loire, the thousand and one beauty spots of the all-beautiful world, which I have yet to see -- trusting in the Fates, which have begun to indulge me, to give me a sight of some of them before I die.

I do not think they could drop me down anywhere and leave me altogether ignorant of where I was, so far and wide has an exploring imagination led me, and so much has it made of its every opportunity, since I first began to read and to look at picture-books. After thirty years of life in the Australian Bush, I went one day to a tea-party in Melbourne, where one of the entertainments provided was a guessing competition. One wall of a room was covered with prints and photographs of public buildings of the world; they were of miscellaneous character, old and new, selected so as not to be too obviously familiar or to give an unfair advantage to experienced travellers amongst the guests. I had never travelled; I do not think I had seen one place of the many represented -- except the Wilson Hall of the Melbourne University, which was the only one to puzzle me; yet I won the first prize easily.