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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Still, common honesty obliges me to say that the impression which I took away with me in the Overland Limited was one of vastness, uncleanness, and ugliness, redeemed only by that sombre, Plutonic magnificence which seems to be the one reward of an absolute and unhesitating sacrifice to blank utility.

And yet I did find one view in Chicago which qualified this, and that was from the western end of the Lake Front. The ragged steamboat piers, the long rows of posts marking the shoals, the piles of the groynes, one or two dilapidated and almost prehistoric steamboats, and blistered, out-of-date yachts laid up along the lake wall, the stately sweep of houses, the huge bulks of the factories in the east, with their towering chimneys pouring out clouds of smoke and steam—these, with the smooth water of the horizonless lake, made a pleasanter mental photograph to take away with one than the unlovely roaring streets and the hideous wealth-crammed stores and warehouses.

From Chicago to Ogden the route of the Union Pacific is about as uninteresting as the central section of the Canadian Pacific, only here the towns and villages are more frequent and the country is naturally far more advanced in cultivation.