Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1884 — The Commercial Tourist. [ARTICLE]

The Commercial Tourist.

A man who lives between a gripsack and Pullman sleeper, who seldom takes more than three successive meals in one county, and who is known to be the most successful commercial traveler in the country, gave some interesting impressions of travel in a recent conversation. “During the last fifteen years,” he said, “I have traveled over 250,000 miles, or ten times around the world. This habit of rapid and incessant motion at all hours and seasons has made me an automaton., The ordinary operation of buying tickets, eating when I can get food, and sleeping in any position, lying, standing, or sitting down, are purely mechanical with me. If I stay off the road any length of time my mind becomes, as it were, side-tracked. I cannot cheek my conversational baggage through from subject to subject, but lose myself in all sorts of vagaries and delusions. I know this sounds absurd, but in a city where I have been detained on business over a certain length of time I have actually ridden fiftriiita into tfie country and back again, simply to compose my thoughts. Of course I feel the thralldom of such a life, and would like to escape from it, But I shall always remain a wandering Jew, compelled to move on until my penance is ended. The most curious part of it all is (and I have compared this feeling of mine with others of my fellow-travelers) the temptation to stop abrubtly in the most out-of-the-way places.”— ‘Merchant Traveler.