Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian StreetStreet, Julian
General
Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
Street, Julian
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
"You ought to look at it," he insisted. "It's a very pretty station."
So we got out and looked at it, and were glad we did, for the driver was
quite right. It was an unusually pretty station--a station superior to
the other in all respects but one: it contained no Miss Daisy Buck.
After some further driving, we returned to the station where she was.
"I suppose we had better go to the Sanitarium for lunch?" I asked her.
"Not on your life," she replied. "If you go to the 'San,' you won't feel
like you'd had anything to eat--that is, not if you're good feeders."
"Where else is there to go?" I asked.
"The Tavern," she advised. "You'll get a first-class dinner there. You
might have larger hotels in New York, but you haven't got any that's
more homelike. At least, that's what I hear. I never was in New York
myself, but I get the dope from the traveling men."
However, not for epicurean reasons, but because of curiosity, we wished
to try a meal at the Sanitarium. Thither we drove in the hack, passing
on our way the office of the "Good Health Publishing Company" and a
small building bearing the sign, "The Coffee Parlor"--which may signify
a Battle Creek substitute for a saloon. I do not know how coffee
drinkers are regarded in that town, but I do know that, while there, I
got neither tea nor coffee--unless "Postum" be coffee and "Kaffir Tea"
be tea.
It was at the Sanitarium that I drank Kaffir Tea. I had it with my
lunch. It looks like tea, and would probably taste like it, too, if they
didn't let the Kaffirs steep so long. But they should use only fresh,
young, tender Kaffirs; the old ones get too strong; they have too much
bouquet. The one they used in my tea may have been slightly spoiled. I
tasted him all afternoon.
The "San" is an enormous brick building like a vast summer hotel. It has
an office which is utterly hotel-like, too, even to the chairs,
scattered about, and the people sitting in them. Many of the people look
perfectly well. Indeed, I saw one young woman who looked so well that I
couldn't take my eyes off from her while she remained in view. She was
in the elevator when we went up to lunch. She looked at me with a
speculative eye--a most engaging eye, it was--as though saying to
herself: "Now there's a promising young man. I might make it interesting
for him if he would stay here for a while. But of course he'd have to
show me a physician's certificate stating that he was not subject to
fits." My companion said that she looked at him a long while, too, but I
doubt that. He was always claiming that they looked at him.
The people who run the Sanitarium are Seventh-Day Adventists, and as we
arrived on Saturday it was the Sabbath there--a rather busy day, I take
it, from the bulletin which was printed upon the back of the dinner
menu:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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