The Southwestern Limited seemed to fairly fly along the banks of the beautiful Hudson, and everything was so delightful that Archie could scarcely believe that only a week or two before he had been walking along country roads, anxious to reach New York, that he might become an office boy. Every thing in this train was as perfect as modern ingenuity could make it, and there was no lack of interesting things to be examined, when Archie tired of the landscape. Then, when the train had been two hours out of New York, he discovered that the famous president of this great railway system was aboard, and, mustering up his courage, he determined to introduce himself. He had long been anxious to see this famous after-dinner orator and statesman, and here was a chance which might not come soon again. So he went back to the drawing-room, and found the great man to be quite as pleasant as he was interesting, and Archie was asked to seat himself and tell something about his experiences since leaving home. Everything he said was listened to with great interest, and this distinguished wit seemed to find many of the adventures very funny indeed. “You have certainly had some wonderful experiences,” he said, when Archie had finished, “and I can appreciate your anxiety to leave school. I had that desire myself when I was a boy of about fifteen, but my father succeeded in making me change my opinion on the subject, and without much argument, unless you can call an ox-team and a stony pasture an argument. I had been asking to stay at home from school for a long time. I said that I was too old to be sitting there with a lot of girls and some younger boys, and that I wanted to work. Finally, my father said that I could stay at home if I cared to, and that he would let me work on the farm for a time. I was overjoyed, of course, at the prospect of staying out of school.
“The next morning I was awakened at four o’clock, and had to swallow my breakfast in a hurry, because I was late, my father said. Then he took me out to the barn and ordered me to hitch up the ox-team, and when this was done he took me out to a pasture lot and told me to pick up all the boulders there. Well, I picked up boulders all day long, and by evening my back and arms were so sore I could hardly move them. I was too tired to eat supper, and was soon asleep in bed. When my father awoke me at four the next morning, I told him to let me alone and that I was going back to school. After that I was content to stay in school, and said nothing more about leaving until I had finished the course and was ready to go to college.”
And Archie thought it very queer that such a famous man should have had such experiences when a boy. He remained in the drawing-room for more than an hour, and when he left he felt perfectly sure that he had been talking with the most charming man in the world.
The train sped on and on, and when daylight came the next morning they were passing through Northern Ohio. Early in the afternoon they reached a great smoky metropolis, spread out for miles over the plains. Archie knew that this must be Chicago, and he decided, as this was Saturday, and the steamer wouldn’t leave San Francisco until the next Friday, that he would have time to remain here over Sunday. So he left the train at the station in Pacific Avenue, and, Finding a hotel near the station, he started out to see something of the city famous for its dirt and for the World’s Fair, two widely different things.
CHAPTER XIII.
SAN FRANCISCO—THE TRANSPORT GONE—WORKING HIS WAY TO HONOLULU BY
PEELING VEGETABLES ON A PACIFIC LINER—THE CAPITAL OF HAWAII.
ARCHIE found Chicago to be so widely different from New York that everything he saw was new and interesting to him. In the afternoon he managed to see something of the congested business section of the city, the tall office buildings, the great stores, and the famous Board of Trade. It was all very fine, he thought, but still it wasn’t nearly so fascinating to him as New York had been on the first day he visited it. “Chicago seems so very much like some great town,” he explained to the hotel clerk in the evening. “I feel as if I were not in a great city at all, because there are not the evidences of a large and wealthy population that we have everywhere in New York.” Archie spoke of New York as if he had lived there always, and found much to criticise in Chicago. But toward evening he went up to Lincoln Park and the beautiful North Shore, and he felt that there was nothing more beautiful in New York than this magnificent park, and this handsome Lake Shore Drive, with its great houses whose lawns reached down almost to the lake itself. On the South Side of the city, too, he found some handsome streets and residences, but there was always that feeling of being in some rapidly growing town. It wasn’t hard for Archie to realise that there were older houses in his native town than could be found anywhere in the great city of Chicago.
The greatest difference between Chicago and New York was to be noticed in the evening. Instead of the brilliantly lighted thoroughfares of upper Broadway and Twenty-third and Thirty-fourth Streets, he found but one street in Chicago which was at all illuminated, and the illuminations there were chiefly signs in front of dime museums. The streets, too, were not so crowded, and Archie almost longed that he could be back on Broadway, if only for a little while.
On Sunday he found Chicago to be a more noisy city than he had ever been in before on that day, and he found that the people made good use of their one weekly holiday. All places of amusement were open, and everything was running in “full blast.”