us, what a comfort and refreshing is it to open the charmed pages of the traveler!  Our narrow, monotonous horizon breaks away all about us; five minutes suffice to take us quite out of the commonplace and familiar regions of our experience:  we are in the Court of the Great Khan, we are pitching tents under the shadows of the ruined temples of Tadmor, we are sitting on a fallen block of the Pyramids, or a fragment of the broken nose of the Sphynx, dickering with Arab Shieks, opposing Yankee shrewdness to Ishmaelitish greed and cunning:  we are shooting crocodiles on the white Nile, unearthing the winged lions of Ezekiel’s vision on the Tigris—­watching the night-dance of the Devil-worshipers on their mountains, negotiating with the shrewd penny-turning patriarch of Armenia for a sample from his holy-oil manufactory at Erivan, drinking coffee at Damascus, and sherbet at Constantinople, lunching in the vale of Chaumorng, taking part in a holy fete at Rome, and a merry Christmas at Berlin.  We look into the happiness of traveling through the eyes of others, and, for the miseries of it, we enjoy them exceedingly.  Very cool and comfortable are we while reading the poor author’s account of his mishaps, hair-breadth escapes, hunger, cold, and nakedness.  We take a deal of satisfaction in his moscheto persecutions and night-long battles with sanguinary fleas.  The discomforts and grievances of his palate under the ordeal of foreign cooking were a real relish for us.  On a hot morning in the tropics, we see him pulling on his stocking with a scorpion in it, and dancing in involuntary joy under the effects of the sting.  Let him dance; it is all for our amusement.  Let him meet with what he will—­robbers, cannibals, jungle-tigers, and rattlesnakes, the more the better—­since we know that he will get off alive, and come to regard them so many god-sends in the way of book-making.

The volumes now before us are not only seasonable as respects the world-wide curiosity in regard to California—­the new-risen empire on the Pacific—­abounding, as they do, in valuable facts and statistics, but they have in a high degree that charm of personal adventure and experience to which we have referred.  Bayard Taylor is a born tourist.  He has eyes to see, skill to make the most of whatever opens before him under the ever-shifting horizon of the traveler.  He takes us along with him, and lets us into the secret of his own hearty enjoyment.  Much of what he describes has already become familiar to us from the notes of a thousand gold-seekers, who have sent home such records as they could of their experiences in a strange land.  Yet even the well known particulars of the overland route across the Isthmus become novel and full of interest in the narrative of our young tourist.  The tropical scenery by day and night on the river, the fandango at Gorgona, and the ride to Panama through the dense dark forest, with death, in the shape of a cholera-stricken emigrant, following at their heels,