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My friend Professor Maturin spoke the very truth. I finished the book before I left my seat, and then and there became a fellow equestrian to Banbury Cross. Deliberately and with prepensive aforethought, I invite the reader to do the same, and thereby to gain not only personal pleasure and profit, but, in addition, the greater satisfaction of contributing a lasting good to others.

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THE writer recently enjoyed the great privilege of being the guest of his friend, Professor Maturin, at a meeting of the Sindbad Society, an organization for the enjoyment of informal discussion concerning the theory and practice, the graces and the usefulness, of foreign travel.

Similar in purpose to the Travellers’ Club of London, but lacking anything like the equipment of that body’s sumptuous Pall Mall home, the Sindbad Society endeavors to fulfil its function by means of occasional dinners in the private rooms of other clubs. Indeed, I was given to understand that the members were unanimous in considering a local habitation, or immovable property of any sort, to be most inappropriate for a club the very essence of which was peregrination. My neighbor at the large round dinner table averred that to own even a portrait of Sindbad the Sailor, the mythical founder and patron of the club, would be to embody in a concrete object sentiments of value only so long as they animated the mind.