The Innocents Abroad


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elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!  
The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary  
pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted  
place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little  
ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. I could  
take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty  
pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as  
sincerely devout as any that come here. They will say it when they get  
home, fast enough, but why should they not? They do not wish to array  
themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world. It does  
not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very  
life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and  
peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek  
and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and  
malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away. I have heard  
shameless people say they were glad to get away from Ladies' Festivals  
where they were importuned to buy by bevies of lovely young ladies.  
Transform those houris into dusky hags and ragged savages, and replace  
their rounded forms with shrunken and knotted distortions, their soft  
hands with scarred and hideous deformities, and the persuasive music of  
their voices with the discordant din of a hated language, and then see  
how much lingering reluctance to leave could be mustered. No, it is the  
neat thing to say you were reluctant, and then append the profound  
thoughts that "struggled for utterance," in your brain; but it is the  
true thing to say you were not reluctant, and found it impossible to  
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