Around the World on a Bicycle, Volume I

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Around the World on a Bicycle V1, by Thomas Stevens

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Around the World on a Bicycle V1, by Thomas Stevens (#1 in our series by Thomas Stevens)
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Title: Around the World on a Bicycle V1
Author: Thomas Stevens
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5136]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on May 12, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, AROUND THE WORLD ON A BICYCLE V1 ***
Around the World on a Bicycle Volume I. From San Francisco to Teheran
By Thomas Stevens
Ray Schumacher [email protected] http://rjs.org
Scanner's Notes: This was scanned from an original edition, copyright 1887, 547 pages. It is as close as I could come in ASCII to the printed text. Scanning time: 15 hours OCR time: 20+ hours Proof #1: 25 hours Proof #2: ? (A slow reading by a friend)
The numerous italics have been unfortunately omitted, and the conjoined '‘' have been changed to 'ae'; as well as others, similarly. I have left the spelling, punctuation, capitalization as close as possible to the printed text, including that of titles and headings. The issue of end-of-line hyphenation was difficult, as normal usage in the 1880's often hyphenated words which have since been concatenated.
Stevens also used phonetic spelling and italics for much of the unfamiliar language or dialects that he heard; a great deal of foreign words and phrases are also included and always italicized. A word which might seem mis-spelled, such as 'yaort', was originally in italics and was the 1886 spelling of 'yogurt'. Many of the names of places and peoples have long since changed and so are no longer easily referenced.
The book is written in the common English of a San Francisco journalist of the era and so is filled with contemporaneous idioms and prejudices, as well as his own wry wit.
One of the more unfortunate issues is the omission of the over 100 illustrations of the original edition. I also elected to omit the informative captions. I hope to make an HTML edition available at http://rjs.org/gutenberg/ which will include them.
If you find any scanning errors, out and out typos, punctuation errors, or if you disagree with my formatting choices please feel free to email me those errors: [email protected] The space between the double quotes and the quoted text is sometimes omitted, usually included. This is an artifact of the OCR program interpreting the small space in the original print, and if someone wants to remove the space from all of the quotes, I would be glad to see it.
I have written a wxPython program to assist in converting raw OCR text to the project's formatting, as well as general punctuation and spelling. http://rjs.org/gutenberg/OCR2Gutenberg/ Code contributions/modifications are most welcome; it is a bit of a hack, but it reduced the proof time needed by more than what it took to write 778 lines of code.
Ray Schumacher
******************************************************************************

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE OVER THE SIERRAS NEVADAS, . . . . . 1
CHAPTER II.
OVER THE DESERTS OF NEVADA, . . . . 21
CHAPTER III.
THROUGH MORMON-LAND AND OVER THE ROCKIES, . . 46
CHAPTER IV.
FROM THE GREAT PLAINS TO THE ATLANTIC, . . 70
CHAPTER V.
FROM AMERICA TO THE GERMAN FRONTIER, . . . 91
CHAPTER VI.
GERMANY, AUSTRIA, AND HUNGARY, . . . . 121
CHAPTER VII.
THROUGH SLAVONIA AND SERVIA, . . . . 153
CHAPTER VIII.
BULGARIA, ROUMELIA, AND INTO TURKEY, . . . 184
PREFACE. Shakespeare says, in All's Well that Ends Well, that "a good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner;" and I never was more struck with the truth of this than when I heard Mr. Thomas Stevens, after the dinner given in his honor by the Massachusetts Bicycle Club, make a brief, off-hand report of his adventures. He seemed like Jules Verne, telling his own wonderful performances, or like a contemporary Sinbad the Sailor. We found that modern mechanical invention, instead of disenchanting the universe, had really afforded the means of exploring its marvels the more surely. Instead of going round the