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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For instance, an American waiter, or barber, or shoeblack says “Sir” quite differently to anybody else in the world, except perhaps the American gentleman who may be worth his millions. There is no suspicion of cringing or inferiority about it, whether it comes from the shoeblack or the millionaire. It seems to say equally from the one as from the other “our circumstances may be different, but we are both of us gentlemen in our way, and so we will behave to each other as gentlemen,” and politeness of that sort is the pleasantest of all politeness.

Now, in Australia—but Australia is still seven thousand miles away across the broad Pacific, so we will talk about that later on. Meanwhile a couple of iron giants have been harnessed to the long line of palace-cars, the mails have been exchanged from train to train, the bells begin to swing and clang out soft musical warning notes, the mellow whistles sing good-bye from engine to engine; “all aboard” is the word, and the Overland Limited threads its way through the maze of shining metals, and heads away westward to where a long, gleaming line of silver backed by a black screen of mountains tipped with diamonds shows the position of the Inland Sea of the Wilderness.