Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. SURPRISING DISTANCES IN THE UNITED STATES. HOW far is it to Chicago? Our young English friend made the inquiry when that city was suggested as convenient headquarters while he might be running up and down the country on a tour of observation. When the answer was given, Something over a thousand miles, he was amazed; for he was fresh from England, whose longest meridian diameter is only three hundred and sixty-five statute miles, from Berwick to St. Alban's Head, and whose narrowest measure 'is sixty-two, from the head of the Solway to Wandsbeck on the German Ocean. Perhaps it is expecting too much that one should know tolerably the travelled lengths and breadths in his own United States; and indeed it would be expecting a great deal. Yet if one has completed a course of common-school or higher study, and can give a fair analysis of any one of Dickens's novels, or outline the status of the unfinished stories in the magazines, or give the prices on stocks or at the best hotels in Europe, one has a right to expect that he can locate leading cities inthe Utiiou within a thousand miles of their true position. When I once spoke to an intelligent friend of having been recently in Omaha, he inquired, with all the simplicity of one of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, Well, did you see the Mormons ? He was surprised that I had not run out to Salt Lake City, just back of Omaha, to interview those peculiar Saints. My answer surprised him more, ? that having seen that whole conglomerate when they constituted Nauvoo, this side the Mississippi, I did not care to go a thousand miles out of my way to visit Salt Lake City. A thousand miles Why, I thought it was just back of Omaha It is just back, as they say out West, where there is room to say such things....
Synopsis
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