Читать книгу In an Unknown Prison Land. An account of convicts and colonists in New Caledonia with jottings out and home онлайн

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It was during this delicious spin that I went into the smoking-room to have a pipe and something else. I sat down in a seat opposite to a man whose appearance stamped him as one of those quietly prosperous Americans who just go to their work and do it with such splendid thoroughness that the doing of it saves their country from falling into the social and political chaos that some other Americans would make of it if they could.

He gave me a light, and we began talking. If it had been in an English train we might have glared at each other for five hundred miles without a word. As it was, we had begun to know each other in half an hour. We talked about the Hudson, and the Catskills, and West Point, and then about the train, and so the talk came back to the inevitable dollar.

“A gorgeous train this,” I said; “far and away beyond anything we have in England. But,” I added with uncalculating haste, “it seems to me pretty expensive.”

“Excuse me,” he said, “I don’t think you’ve figured it out. You’re going to San Francisco, thirty-two hundred miles from here. All the way you have a comfortable train,”—that was his lordly way of putting it,—“you have servants to wait on you day and night, a barber to shave you, a stenographer to dictate your letters to, and you never need get off the train except for the change at Chicago.