I Married Adventure [antikvár]

Foreword Here, in a story about everywhere else in the world, is romantic Americana that will one day be history. These pages are themselves adventure. Here the watchmaker's boy from Independence out in Kansas meets the Santa Fe engineer's daughter from Chanute, plain people from the prairies. Against that homespun background is woven a life and career filled with exotic color. Many a story is called a saga. This is one—in all the meaning of that word from the language of Martin Johnson's Scandinavian forebears. Martin was as born to adventure road as Lief-the-Lucky, and when Osa married Martin she married his destiny, too. It was to be always a-going, always a-seeing. Home was to be a schooner in the South Seas, a raft in Borneo, a tent on safari, a hunt in the black Congo, sometimes a dash of Paris, interludes of an apartment on Fifth Avenue—but always a place to be going from. No matter where or how, through it all, the telling is no mere travelogue and picture album, but rather the intimate tale of their two lives—boy and girl from Kansas, pushing their horizons into far places. The bigger story is of their life, sometimes to be read between the lines, and not quite so much of the world they went to see as of the hearts they took with them. The American Museum of Natural History with its great halls of exhibits and its laboratories has also a great invisible collection of o