As we drove over the rough streets of New York in the early hours of Sunday morning, it appeared as a city of the dead. There was no sign of life as our horses toiled along Broadway and up Fifth Avenue to the Buckingham Hotel, where we had secured rooms. This hotel, though comfortable, had the disadvantage of being too far up town for short sojourners, but it has the merit of being conducted on the European system—that is, the rooms and meals are charged for separately. The American plan is to make an inclusive charge of from four to five dollars a day, and it is often troublesome only being able to have meals in the dining-room between certain hours. Besides, it is pleasant to be able to visit the restaurants of New York, which are admirable, and equal, if not superior to those of Paris. Delmonico's, where we dined one evening, is particularly excellent. We were glad when eleven o'clock came and we could go to St. Thomas' Church, close by. It is one of the most frequented of the many beautiful churches of all denominations in New York, and of very fine interior proportions. Upon the dark oak carving is reflected in many hues the rich stained glass. The service was rendered according to the ritual of the English Church, which is followed by the Episcopal Church of America. They succeed in America in uniting a non-ceremonial service with a bright and hearty one. We listened to a very powerful sermon on St. Paul on the Hill of Mars, in which the eloquent preacher boldly declared that the political honesty of the Athenians 2000 years ago was superior to that of the United States of to-day. On our way back we went into the Roman Catholic Cathedral, which was just opposite to our windows at the "Buckingham," a very large marble building, but still unfinished. We found four reporters waiting at the hotel to "interview" my husband. He had eluded them on the landing-stage, but they would take no denial here, and we were much harassed by others in the course of the day. Our luggage arrived at noon. It is almost a necessity to employ the Express Company for the conveyance of "baggage" throughout America, as the hackney carriages and hotel omnibuses are not prepared to take it. The charges are very high, and it is often extremely inconvenient having to wait two, three, or even four hours for it, after arrival in a town. The geography of New York is exceedingly simple, and is followed in nearly every American city. "Avenues" traverse the length of the town, which are called first, second, or third avenues, and the "streets" which intersect them are also numbered consecutively, so that you have—Third Street, Fifth Avenue, and know that it is the third street from the commencement of Fifth Avenue.

Ethel Gwendoline in the book "Forty Thousand Miles Over Land and Water" describes her travels with her husband through the British Empire and America in the late 1800s. This book serves as a simple descriptive journal of what she saw and did. It contains their travels across the Atlantic through the USA and Canada, across the Pacific to Australia and New Zealand, the Dutch East Indies, the Indian subcontinent, and Egypt.

This thoughtful examination of a century of travel writing about the American West overturns a variety of popular and academic stereotypes. Looking at both European and American travelers’ accounts of the West, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, David Wrobel offers a counter narrative to the nation’s romantic entanglement with its western past and suggests the importance of some long-overlooked authors, lively and perceptive witnesses to our history who deserve new attention. Prior to the professionalization of academic disciplines, the reading public gained much of its knowledge about the world from travel writing. Travel writers found a wide and respectful audience for their reports on history, geography, and the natural world, in addition to reporting on aboriginal cultures before the advent of anthropology as a discipline. Although in recent decades western historians have paid little attention to travel writing, Wrobel demonstrates that this genre in fact offers an important and rich understanding of the American West—one that extends and complicates a simple reading of the West that promotes the notions of Manifest Destiny or American exceptionalism. Wrobel finds counterpoints to the mythic West of the nineteenth century in such varied accounts as George Catlin’s Adventures of the Ojibbeway and Ioway Indians in England, France, and Belgium (1852), Richard Francis Burton’s The City of the Saints (1861), and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897), reminders of the messy and contradictory world that people navigated in the past much as they do in the present. His book is a testament to the instructive ways in which the best travel writers have represented the West.