It is difficult for me to remember a railway junction in which there was nothing to do; but perhaps Pyrgos, in Greece, comes nearest to this description.  At this point, you change cars on your way from Patras to Olympia.  The town is made of mud:  that is to say, the single-storied houses are built of unbaked clay.  There is nothing to see in Pyrgos.  But I amused myself by addressing the inhabitants, in the English language, with an eloquent oration that soon gathered them under my control; and thereafter I set a hundred of them at the pleasant task of trying to push the train for Olympia on its way to take me to the Hermes of Praxiteles.  I knew no word of their language, nor did they of mine; but they understood that that train should be started, if human force were sufficient to help the cars upon their way:  and finally, when the engine puffed and snorted with a tardily awakened sense of duty, the train was cheered by the entire population as I waved my hand from the rear platform and quoted one of Daniel Webster’s perorations.

* * * * *

Is it—­I have often wondered—­so difficult as people think, to be happy in an hour “spent waiting at a railway junction"?...  The kingdom of happiness is within us; or else there is no truth in our assumption that the will of man is free:  and I am inclined to pity a man who, being happy in Amalfi—­the loveliest of all the places I have ever seen—­cannot also manage to be happy in Pyrgos—­or in Essex Junction—­and to communicate his happiness to his responsive fellow-travelers.

The true enjoyment of traveling is to enjoy traveling; not to relish merely the places you are going to, but to relish also the adventure of the going.  The most difficult train-journey I remember is the twenty-hour trip from Lisbon to Sevilla, with a change of cars in the ghastly early morning at the border-town of Badajoz and another change at noon at the sun-baked, parched, and God-forsaken town of Merida; and yet I relish as red letters on my personal map of Spain a pleasant quarrel over the price of sandwiches at Badajoz and the way a muleteer of Merida flung a colored cloak over his shoulder and posed for an unconscious moment like a painting by Zuloaga.

And this philosophy has a deeper application to life at large:  for all life may be figured as a journey, and few there are who are natively equipped for the enjoyment of all the waste and waiting places on the way.  The minds of most people are so fixed upon the storied capitals that are featured in those works of fiction known as guidebooks that they are impeded from enjoying the minor stations on their journey.  “Hurry me to Sevilla,” cries the traveler—­and misses the sight of my muleteer of Merida.  In America, our society is crammed with people who fail to enjoy life on five thousand a year because their minds are fixed upon that distant time when they hope to enjoy life on twenty thousand a year.  And if ever they attain that twenty thousand they will not enjoy it either; but will merely peer forward to a hypothetical enjoyment at fifty thousand a year.  And this is the essence of their tragedy:—­they have not learned to wait with happiness.