My Life in Many States and in Foreign Lands Part 22

To these three trips I attach no more importance, I hope, than is fairly their due. In each of them, in succession, I had beaten all previous records of travel; and this was something in the interests of all persons who travel, as showing what could be done under stress, and as a stimulus to greater efforts to reduce the long months and days consumed on voyages from country to country. But they were, as I consider them, merely incidents in a life that has better things to show. One of these voyages, the one in which I "put a girdle round the earth" in eighty days, has the honor of having given the suggestion for one of the most interesting romances in literature. This, at least, is something.

But I give this brief account of my voyages, at the end of my autobiography, chiefly because I regard them as somewhat typical of my life. I have lived fast. I have ever been an advocate of speed. I was born into a slow world, and I wished to oil the wheels and gear, so that the machine would spin faster and, withal, to better purposes. I suggested larger and fleeter s.h.i.+ps, to shorten travel on the ocean. I built street-railways, so that the workers of the world might save a few minutes from their days of pitiless toil, and so might have a little leisure for enjoyment and self-improvement. I built great railway lines--the Atlantic and Great Western, and the Union Pacific--that the continent might be traversed by men and commerce more rapidly, and its waste places made to blossom like the rose. I wished to add a stimulus, a spur, a goad--if necessary--that the slow, old world might go on more swiftly, "and fetch the age of gold," with more leisure, more culture, more happiness. And so I put faster s.h.i.+ps on the oceans, and faster means of travel on land.

My own rapid tours of the world are, therefore, typical of my life. Thus an account of them seems to round it off fitly with a "Bon voyage" to every one.