TO VISIT FOREIGN LANDS
If you want to visit Italy, the home of art, the land of beauty, the country that is like a wondrous old book, you must get the novels of Italian life written by Marion Crawford; they will show you pictures of the Italy of to-day, and in them you will also find descriptions of famous pictures and palaces that will make you hunt for yourself the books that will touch upon the subjects in which you have grown to have an interest. You will read Mrs. Piozzi's "Glimpses of Italian Society in the Eighteenth Century." You will find yourself searching out for the lives of the popes, and of the pagans as well, until some day you will discover that you want to possess, that you may look at it often, the book of that Christian Pagan, "The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius."
Russia, with its mystery and awfulness, is a country that you long to know about. Then you must take up "The Midnight Sun; or, The Tsar and the Nihilist," by Buckley. You will read Kennan on Siberia, and Stepniak, as he writes about the Russian peasantry; then you will give a jump away back and read the life of Catherine the Great, and so will understand why Russia has become what it is. I do not advise you to read the Russian novels of to-day.
