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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At Ogden, where the iron roads from every part of the continent seem to meet, and where big, high-shouldered engines from Mexico and Texas whistled their greetings to brother monsters from Maine and California, I felt sorely tempted to stop off and take the thirty-mile run to Salt Lake City, but

“The steamer won’t wait for the train,”

and I should have risked missing my boat to Honolulu—added to which I had made some friends on the train who were going to show me round San Francisco in case I had a day or so there, so I read my Kipling instead, and saw the Mormon city with keener eyes than mine.

By the way, American manners appear to have altered very much for the better since Kipling made his journey “From Sea to Sea.” I traversed a good deal of the same ground, and stayed at some of the same hotels that he did, but I never met with more straight-spoken, dignified courtesy in any part of the world.

I never saw hotel clerks who blazed with diamonds, or who treated me like a worm. As a matter of fact I never met more polite, obliging, well-informed men in any similar position. Certainly they could give many points to hotel managers and clerks in England and Australia.