Cartomania by Gelett Burgess — Read

With something of the excitement Alice felt when she crawled through the looking-glass, I used to pore over my atlas. Geography was for me a pastime rather than a study. There was one page in the book where the huge bulging expanse of the United States lay, and there, on the extreme left hand of the vari-coloured patchwork of States and territories, was the abode of romance and adventure -- a long and narrow patch tinted pink, curving with the Pacific Ocean, and ribbed with the fuzzy haschures of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. This was the Ultima Thule of my dreams, beyond which my sober-minded hopes dared not stray.

Further on in the book I saw Europe, irregular with ragged peninsulas and bays, Asia, vast and shapeless, with the great blue stretch of Siberia atop, and the clumsy barren yellow triangle of Africa. But these foreign countries were, to my young imagination, as inaccessible as Fairyland; they did not properly come into the world of possibility. They were as unreal as ghosts, remote as the Feudal Ages, and I put them by with a sigh as hopeless. The world is a big place to the eyes of a child, and all beyond his ken but names. How could I know that the end of the century was even then whirling me toward wonders that even my Arabian Magi would not have thought possible? But today, in this far Western town, then but a semi-barbarous camp of gold miners, I have seen an airship half-completed upon the stocks, and this morning, in my own room, I rang up Celestine and talked with her over the wire a hundred miles away!