CHAPTER I.

       A PROPOSAL TO GIRDLE THE EARTH.

       Table of Contents

      WHAT gave me the idea?

      It is sometimes difficult to tell exactly what gives birth to an idea. Ideas are the chief stock in trade of newspaper writers and generally they are the scarcest stock in market, but they do come occasionally,

      This idea came to me one Sunday. I had spent a greater part of the day and half the night vainly trying to fasten on some idea for a newspaper article. It was my custom to think up ideas on Sunday and lay them before my editor for his approval or disapproval on Monday. But ideas did not come that day and three o'clock in the morning found me weary and with an aching head tossing about in my bed. At last tired and provoked at my slowness in finding a subject, something for the week's work, I thought fretfully:

      "I wish I was at the other end of the earth!"

      "And why not?" the thought came: "I need a vacation; why not take a trip around the world?"

      It is easy to see how one thought followed another. The idea of a trip around the world pleased me and I added: "If I could do it as quickly as Phileas Fogg did, I should go."

      Then I wondered if it were possible to do the trip eighty days and afterwards I went easily off to sleep with the determination to know before I saw my bed again if Phileas Fogg's record could be broken.

      I went to a steamship company's office that day and made a selection of time tables. Anxiously I sat down and went over them and if I had found the elixir of life I should not have felt better than I did when I conceived a hope that a tour of the world might be made in even less than eighty days.

      I approached my editor rather timidly on the subject. I was afraid that he would think the idea too wild and visionary.

      "Have you any ideas?" he asked, as I sat down by his desk.

      "One," I answered quietly.

      He sat toying with his pens, waiting for me to continue, so I blurted out:

      "I want to go around the world!"

      "Well?" he said, inquiringly looking up with a faint smile in his kind eyes.

      "I want to go around in eighty days or less. I think I can beat Phileas Fogg's record. May I try it?"

      To my dismay he told me that in the office they had thought of this same idea before and the intention was to send a man. However he offered me the consolation that he would favor my going, and then we went to talk with the business manager about it.

      "It is impossible for you to do it," was the terrible verdict. "In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes. Besides you speak nothing but English, so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this."

      "Very well," I said angrily, "Start the man, and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him."

      "I believe you would," he said slowly. I would not say that this had any influence on their decision, but I do know that before we parted I was made happy by the promise that if any one was commissioned to make the trip, I should be that one.

      After I had made my arrangements to go, other important projects for gathering news came up, and this rather visionary idea was put aside for a while.

      One cold, wet evening, a year after this discussion, I received a little note asking me to come to the office at once. A summons, late in the afternoon, was such an unusual thing to me that I was to be excused if I spent all my time on the way to the office wondering what I was to be scolded for.

      I went in and sat down beside the editor waiting for him to speak. He looked up from the paper on which he was writing and asked quietly: "Can you start around the world day after tomorrow?"

      "I can start this minute," I answered, quickly trying to stop the rapid beating of my heart.

      "We did think of starting you on the City of Paris tomorrow morning, so as to give you ample time to catch the mail train out of London. There is a chance if the Augusta Victoria, which sails the morning afterwards, has rough weather of your failing to connect with the mail train."

      "I will take my chances on the Augusta Victoria, and save one extra day," I said.

      The next morning I went to Ghormley, the fashionable dressmaker, to order a