Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays

Chapter 2: TO PAUL BOURGET

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About This Book

A mixed collection of travel sketches and personal essays that records journeys, crowded cross-country passage, island life, and visits to European landscapes while balancing concrete reportage with reflective comment. Vivid, sensory scenes of transit and social encounter sit beside nostalgic memories and compact meditations on dreams, mortality, charity, and the small vanities of life. Pieces range from anecdote and landscape portrait to philosophical digression, linked by a conversational, observant voice that shifts between wit, melancholy, and quiet moral attention to people and places encountered on the road.

TO PAUL BOURGET

Traveller and student and curious as you are, you will never have heard the name of Vailima, most likely not even that of Upolu, and Samoa itself may be strange to your ears. To these barbaric seats there came the other day a yellow book with your name on the title, and filled in every page with the exquisite gifts of your art. Let me take and change your own words: J’ai beau admirer les autres de toutes mes forces, c’est avec vous que je me complais à vivre.

R. L. S.

Vailima,
Upolu,
Samoa.