Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

On Sunday Divine Service was celebrated in the saloon. The service was that of the Established Church. The Germans absented themselves. The Americans were all present, and behaved very well, many of them making the responses audibly. The Bishop of Ontario read the prayers, and an English clergyman preached. Some of the Americans proposed to him that he should, as they expressed it, ‘hold another meeting’ in the evening; but it would not have been right to drive the Germans a second time on to the deck.

CHAPTER II.

NEW YORK—MENU AT FIFTH AVENUE HOTEL—HOW TRAVEL IN THE STATES MAY BE ARRANGED FOR A WINTER TOUR—THE QUEEN’S BOOK IN AMERICA—EXTERNAL APPEARANCE OF NEW YORK—IGNORANCE OF ENGLISH IMMIGRANTS—INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS—CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY—NUMBER OF CHURCHES—BROAD VIEWS GENERAL—A SERVICE AT THE REV. H. W. BEECHER’S CHURCH—EPISCOPALIAN BROAD CHURCH CLUB—CHAPELS IN POOR DISTRICTS ANNEXED TO EPISCOPAL CHURCHES IN RICH ONES—AMERICAN CHURCHES WORKED AT HIGH PRESSURE—AN AMERICAN DIVINE’S OPINION OF A MINISTER’S DUTY.

During my first visit to New York I stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which I had been told was the largest and best managed of the monster hotels of the city. I arrived just in time for dinner. On being shown into the dining-saloon, I found between two and three hundred people at table. I had lately been staying at Paris at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, where it was thought we were treated rather liberally in having seven plats at dinner, including two sweets, and one cream or water ice. The ice was served in infinitesimal morsels; and if you asked for a second morsel, it was represented by an additional franc in your bill. With this experience of a great European hotel fresh in my mind, a waiter in the dining saloon of the Fifth Avenue Hotel placed in my hand the bill of fare for the dinner then going on. Seeing almost an interminable printed list of comestibles, and not knowing how these things were managed in America, I supposed that this was the list of dishes the hotel undertook to prepare; and that, had I arrived some hours earlier, and then made my selection, what I might have ordered would have now been ready. The menu contained turtle soup, venison, turtle steaks, soft-shelled crabs, canvas-back ducks; in short, whatever fish, flesh, fowl, vegetable, and fruit were then in season. But the attendant informed me that the paper he had given me was the bill of fare for that day, and that everything mentioned in it was then actually ready; and that I might order whatever I pleased, and it would be immediately brought to me. I made my selection; and while he was bringing what I had ordered, I counted the number of dishes provided that day for our dinner, and found that the total amounted to seventy-five. Nothing was supplied in the scanty way in which everything was doled out at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre; but as a general rule more of everything was set before you than you could require: for instance, instead of setting before you a morsel of ice-cream, a whole mould was left with you till you ordered it to be taken away. The next morning I found fifty-two things mentioned on the bill of fare for breakfast. Luncheon, tea, and supper are also supplied to its guests by this establishment. On the ground-floor are placed the bar, the billiard-room (containing twelve tables), and a kind of after-hour Stock Exchange, in which operations are commenced at eight o’clock P. M. The charge for living in this palatial hotel was five dollars a day in greenbacks; that is, about sixteen shillings, at the then price of gold.

Menu of an American Hotel.

One frequently hears the severity of their winters urged as a reason for not travelling in the United States at that season of the year. My own experience of the unusually severe winter of ’67-68 would go some way towards proving that those who press this consideration do so under a misapprehension. It is possible that by a singular run of good luck I may have always been at a warm place when the weather was cold elsewhere, but it is literally true that during that winter I never once had occasion to put on an overcoat, excepting when I was in Canada at its breaking up. I left New York early in January; went through the South, where I gathered ripe oranges from the trees on which they were hanging; ascended the Mississippi; crossed the prairies and plains to the Rocky Mountains, at the foot of which I found the thermometer, at Denver, standing at 70°; recrossed the prairies to Chicago; and during the whole of this time, whether on foot, or in a railway car, or on or in a coach, did not on any occasion find the weather disagreeable on account of the cold, though I frequently found it in railway cars and in hotels very much warmer than was agreeable. By what I have just said I do not mean that I never fell in with weather that was thermometrically cold, for I walked over the Mississippi on the ice at St. Louis, but that it never felt disagreeably cold. It so happened that whenever the thermometer was low, the air was still, and the sun bright. During this winter it only rained twice, and never snowed but once, at the places at which I happened to be staying. It rained once at Washington, and once at New Orleans, and it was snowing on my return across the prairies to Chicago. On my outward journey over them they were entirely free from snow. Of course if I had remained during the whole of this time at any one place in the northern part of the Union, I should have seen some bad weather. My conclusion, however, is that the traveller may so arrange his tour even for the winter as to be put to very little annoyance by the cold or wet.

The Queen’s Book in America.

Everybody in New York had read the Queen’s book; in every society I found people talking about it; and I never heard it mentioned without expressions of interest and approval, always uttered without any qualifications, and with unmistakable heartiness. They said it made royalty appear to them in a new and more human light, in which they had never regarded it before. They spoke of her as the head of the Anglo-Saxon race, almost as if they had as much part in her as ourselves. I believe that her Majesty’s work has had a greater number of readers, and that a greater number of copies of it have been sold, in the United States than in the United Kingdom.

The exterior appearance of New York is at first disappointing. We are accustomed to find in every capital we visit large and stately buildings, which, as in the case of royal or imperial palaces, public offices, and the hotels of a territorial nobility, are the results of our own existing institutions; or, as in the case of cathedrals, churches, town-halls, and castles, are the result of a state of things belonging to the past history of Europe; and so when we walk through the streets of a city larger than most European capitals, and find none of the buildings we are in the habit of seeing everywhere else, we condemn it as architecturally poor. This feeling is increased in New York by the fact that there is nothing very striking in Broadway, its main street, except its length. The shops, or stores as they are called, are rendered externally quite ineffective by the narrowness of their frontage, and by the way in which they are converted into an advertising frame for names and announcements of various kinds. When you get inside the door you find as extensive and rich an assortment of goods as can be seen in the best shops of London or Paris: there is, however, little indication of this from the outside. But a better acquaintance with the city qualifies to a great extent this first feeling of disappointment. It is irrational to condemn a place for not having what it is impossible could ever have been there. New York cannot have imperial palaces, or mediæval cathedrals, not even great public offices; but in the part of the Fifth Avenue, and of the contiguous streets, which is occupied with the residences of private citizens, it is not surpassed by anything of the same kind in any city of the world. Certainly Belgravia can show nothing like it. There is no stucco, nor are the houses built, as is the case in our streets, in rows of monotonous uniformity, but in some places each separate house differs in design from its neighbours. Sometimes you may find three or four that are alike, but seldom more than half a dozen; and probably those that are alike in general design will vary in the ornamentation of the doors and windows; thus indicating that they are not run up to order, as in Paris, or on speculation, as in London, but that they were built by the people who inhabit them. This variety of façade, where nothing is mean, of course contributes very much to the effect of street architecture. The materials, too, used for building in New York are better and more varied than those used by ourselves. In the best quarters a chocolate-coloured stone is the most common. Brick, which is always painted, and dressed with stone, comes next in frequency; then a stone which in colour is compounded of a yellowish-white with a very perceptible trace of green. Some of the largest stores and hotels, and occasionally a private residence and church, are of white marble. Of this latter material is constructed the imposing office of the New York Herald—I suppose the most magnificent newspaper office in the world.

New York.