A FLIGHT IN SPRING
I
The Circumstances of the Flight. — The Start. — The Car "Lucania." — The Kitchen. — The Cook. — The Poetic Dinner. — Our Accommodations. — Visitors at Newark. — Improvised Theatricals. — Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, Washington. — The Approaching War Crisis.
It seemed like a dream to be invited to join a party on a private Pullman car for an extended tour of close on eight thousand miles, all in these our United States! Yet such was the opportunity which was generously offered us in this springtime of 1898.
It was to be "A Flight in Spring" of most intense interest. The journey was to embrace in its continued circuit, from New York back to New York, points as widely separated as New Orleans and San Francisco. It was to traverse many States and Territories, and was to be accomplished with every adjunct of unstinted comfort and refinement.
The expected morning when we were to start on our journey came at last, with that subdued wonder in it that the dream, so unlooked for, was really to be a fact. Bags and satchels were all packed, and with that happy feeling which always comes to the tourist when, all ready, he is safely ensconced in his cab, we sped to the Twenty-third Street ferry for the Pennsylvania depot in Jersey City.
Never did the great Hudson River look so beautiful or New York so magnificent in our eyes as on that early morning of April 13th, when, through and beyond it all, we could see in imagination the great journey before us, all made more radiant by a munificent hospitality which had made it for us a fact—"A Flight in Spring"—which we had often thought of, but never hoped to see.
To start off on such a journey, with a six weeks' vacation in view, even if undertaken all alone and in most prosaic economy, would be an event; but when one was met by pleasant friends and ushered into an independent, self-contained flying home on wheels, it was indeed something ideal.