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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I presented my ordinary first-class tickets at the booking-office in the Central Depôt, and then came from the lips of the keen-faced, but most polite and obliging clerk, the inevitable “five dollars please—and if you’re going on the South-Western Limited it will be one dollar more. You see this is one of the fastest trains in the world, and we keep it select. You’ll have a section to yourself all the way.”

I checked my trunk in the baggage-office and said a thankful good-bye to it for three thousand two hundred miles, after buying a new strap for it, which, curiously enough, was not a dollar, but seventy-five cents. Then I took possession of my cosy corner in the long, luxuriously furnished car to be whirled over a thousand miles of iron road in twenty-three hours and a half.

Soon after we had pulled out of New York and the bogey wheels had begun the deep-voiced hum which was to last day and night for the inside of a week, I saw something which struck me again and again in the run across the continent. A big American city is like a robe of cloth of gold with a frayed and tattered border of dirty cotton. Its outskirts are unutterably ragged and squalid.