A Tramp Trip: How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day

Lee Meriwether

Jan 1886 · Harper & brothers

About this ebook

The first-class tourist may see the beauties of a country's landscapes and scenery from the window of a palace-car, but his vision goes no further--does not penetrate below the surface. To know a country one must fraternize with its people, must live with them, sympathize with them, win their confidence. High life in Europe has been paid sufficient attention by travellers and writers. I was desirous of seeing something of low life; I donned the blouse and hobnailed shoes of a workman, and spent a year in a "Tramp Trip" from Gibraltar to the Bosporus. Some of my experiences have been related in letters to the New York World, the Philadelphia Press, the St. Louis Republican, and other American newspapers, and in my official report to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C., on the condition of the laboring classes in Europe. While the following pages contain some of those newspaper letters, the greater portion is now in print for the first time. -- Preface.