Not one of our immediate party, most happily, had ever been beyond
Boston Harbor before, and so we all plunged without fear or apology into
the delicious sense of foreignness; we moved as those in dreams. No one
could ever precisely remember what we said or what we did, only that we
were somehow boated ashore till we landed with difficulty amid high surf
on a wave-worn quay, amid an enthusiastic throng of women in dark-blue
hooded cloaks which we all took for priestly vestments, and of beggars
in a combination of patches which no sane person could reasonably take
for vestments of any sort, until one saw how scrupulously they were
washed and how carefully put together.

The one overwhelming fact of the first day abroad is the simple
sensation that one _is_ abroad: a truth that can never be made anything
but commonplace in the telling, or anything but wonderful in the
fulfilling. What Emerson says of the landscape is true here: no
particular foreign country is so remarkable as the necessity of being
remarkable under which every foreign country lies. Horace Walpole found
nothing in Europe so astonishing as Calais; and we felt that at every
moment the first edge of novelty was being taken off for life, and that,
if we were to continue our journey round the world, we never could have
that first day's sensations again. Yet because no one can spare time to
describe it at the moment, this first day has never yet been described;
all books of travels begin on the second day; the daguerreotype-machine
is not ready till the expression has begun to fade out. Months had been
spent in questioning our travelled friends, sheets of old correspondence
had been disinterred, sketches studied, Bullar's unsatisfactory book
read, and now we were on the spot, and it seemed as if every line and
letter must have been intended to describe some other place on the
earth, and not this strange, picturesque, Portuguese, Semi-Moorish