"Professor, the automobile hardly falls in with your notions."
"On the contrary, the automobile is the one absolutely fit conveyance for America. It is a noisy, dirty, mechanical contrivance, capable of great speed; it is the only vehicle in which one could approach that distant smudge on the landscape with any sense of the eternal fitness of things. A coach and four would be as far behind the times on this highway as a birch-bark canoe on yonder lake. In America an automobile is beautiful because it is in perfect harmony with the spirit of the age and country; it is twin brother to the trolley; train, trolley, and automobile may travel side by side as members of one family, late offsprings of man's ingenuity."
"But you would not call them things of beauty?"
"Yes and no; beauty is so largely relative that one cannot pronounce hideous anything that is a logical and legitimate development. Considered in the light of things the world pronounces beautiful, there are no more hideous monstrosities on the face of the earth than train, trolley, and automobile; but each generation has its own standard of beauty, though it seldom confesses it. We say and actually persuade ourselves that we admire the Parthenon; in reality we admire the mammoth factory and the thirty-story office building. Strive as we may to deceive ourselves by loud protestations, our standards are not the standards of old. We like best the things we have; we may call things ugly, but we think them beautiful, for they are part of us,—and the automobile fits into our surroundings like a pocket in a coat. We may turn up our noses at it or away from it, as the case may be, but none the less it is the perambulator of the twentieth century."
It was exactly one o'clock when we pulled up near the City Hall. Total time from Erie five hours and fifty minutes, actual running time five hours, distance by road about ninety-four miles.
CHAPTER SIX BUFFALO THE MIDWAY
Housing the machine in a convenient and well-appointed stable for automobiles, we were reminded of the fact that we had arrived in Buffalo at no ordinary time, by a charge of three dollars per night for storage, with everything else extra. But was it not the Exposition we had come to see? and are not Expositions proverbially expensive—to promoters and stockholders as well as visitors?
Then, too, the hotels of Buffalo had expected so much and were so woefully disappointed. Vast arrays of figures had been compiled showing that within a radius of four hundred miles of Buffalo lived all the people in the United States who were worth knowing. The statistics were not without their foundation in fact, but therein lay the weakness of the entire scheme so far as hotels were concerned; people lived so near they could leave home in the morning with a boiled egg and a sandwich, see the Exposition and get back at night. Travellers passing through would stop over during the day and evening, then go their way on a midnight train,—it was cheaper to ride in a Pullman than stay in Buffalo.
We might have taken rooms at Rochester, running back and forth each day in the machine,—though Rochester was by no means beyond the zone of exorbitant charges. Notions of value become very much congested within a radius of two or three hundred miles of any great Exposition.
The Exposition was well worth seeing in parts by day and as a whole by night. The electrical display at night was a triumph of engineering skill and architectural arrangement. It was the falls of Niagara turned into stars, the mist of the mighty cascade crystallized into jewels, a brilliant crown to man's triumph over the forces of nature.