I know you have with you a trunk and a small portmanteau. I would advise you to leave your trunk at the Grand Pacific, and to take with you only the portmanteau, while you are in the neighborhood of Chicago. You will thus save trouble, expense, etc.
On looking at my route, I found that the “neighborhood of Chicago” included St. Paul, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis: something like a little two-thousand-mile tour “in the neighborhood of Chicago,” to be done in about one week.
When I confided my troubles to my American friends, I got little sympathy from them.
“That’s quite right,” they would say; “we call the neighborhood of a city any place which, by starting after dinner, you can reach at about breakfast time the next day. You dine, you go on board the car, you have a smoke, you go to bed, you sleep, you wake up, you dress—and there you are. Do you see?”
After all you may be of this opinion, if you do not reckon sleeping time. But I do reckon it, when I have to spend the night in a closed box, six feet long, and three feet wide, and about two feet high, and especially when the operation has to be repeated three or four times a week.
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And the long weary days that are not spent in traveling, how can they be passed, even tolerably, in an American city, where the lonely lecturer knows nobody, and where there is absolutely nothing to be seen beyond the hotels and the dry-goods stores? Worse still: he sometimes has the good luck to make the acquaintance of some charming people: but he has hardly had time to fix their features in his memory, when he has to go, probably never to see them again.
The lecturer speaks for an hour and a half on the platform every evening, the rest of his time is exclusively devoted to keeping silence. Poor fellow! how grateful he is to the hotel clerk who sometimes—alas, very seldom—will chat with him for a few minutes. As a rule the hotel clerk is a mute, who assigns a room to you, or hands you the letters waiting for you in the box corresponding to your number. His mouth is closed. He may have seen you for half a minute only; he will remember you. Even in a hotel accommodating over a thousand guests, he will know you, he will know the number of your room, but he won’t speak. He is not the only American that won’t speak. Every man in America who is attending to some duty of other, has his mouth closed. I have tried the railroad conductor, and found him mute. I have had a shot at the porter in the Pullman car, and found him mute. I have endeavored to draw out the janitors of the halls where I was to speak in the evening, and I have failed. Even the negroes won’t speak. You would imagine that speaking was prohibited by the statute-book. When my lecture was over, I returned to the hotel, and like a culprit crept to bed.
THE SLEEPING CAR.