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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Cities, of course, are numerous. They vary in size from two to fifty thousand inhabitants; but structurally they are all the same—tin-roofed houses of weather-board, banks and offices, stores and factories, and elevators of brick ranged along wide and mostly unpaved roads with plank side-walks.

No apparent attempt has been made at order or uniformity. Where a big building is wanted there it is put, and where a little wooden shanty serves its purpose there it remains.

There is plenty of elbow-room, and so the village spreads itself into the city in a quite promiscuous fashion, something like a boy left to grow up into a man according to his own sweet will. But be it well noted that he becomes a man all the same, for every one of these cities, big or small, wood or brick, or both, was teeming with life and humming with business.

One of the many visible signs of this could be seen in the number of telegraph-wires slung on huge unsightly poles running up both sides of the unkempt streets; in fact, an American inland city of five thousand inhabitants seems to do a good deal more telegraphing and telephoning than an English town of fifty thousand.