One other feature of the villages, towns, and “cities” along the route struck me rather forcibly. Nearly all of them, big and little, have very fine stations—I beg pardon, depôts. In fact, the practice seems to be to build a fine, big depôt and let the city grow up to it. Thus, for instance, at Omaha City, where we had a half-hour’s wait changing horses and looking out for hot boxes, I found the depôt built of grey granite, floored with marble, and entered by two splendid twin staircases curving down through a domed and pillared hall to spacious waiting-rooms and offices opening on to a platform about a quarter of a mile long. It was the sort of station you would expect to find in a go-ahead English or European city that possessed streets and squares and houses to match. Now Omaha is go-ahead, and big, and busy, but for all you can see of it from the train and station it is scattered promiscuously around hill and dale, and the palatial station itself stands in the midst of a waste of sloppy roads traversed as usual by the hurrying electric trams, and bordered by little, shabby, ill-assorted wooden houses which don’t look worth fifty pounds apiece. For all that, Omaha is one of the busiest and wealthiest cities of the Middle States. At Ogden, where the iron roads from every part of the continent seem to meet, and where big, high-shouldered engines from Mexico and Texas whistled their greetings to brother monsters from Maine and California, I felt sorely tempted to stop off and take the thirty-mile run to Salt Lake City, but “The steamer won’t wait for the train,” and I should have risked missing my boat to Honolulu—added to which I had made some friends on the train who were going to show me round San Francisco in case I had a day or so there, so I read my Kipling instead, and saw the Mormon city with keener eyes than mine. By the way, American manners appear to have altered very much for the better since Kipling made his journey “From Sea to Sea.” I traversed a good deal of the same ground, and stayed at some of the same hotels that he did, but I never met with more straight-spoken, dignified courtesy in any part of the world. I never saw hotel clerks who blazed with diamonds, or who treated me like a worm. As a matter of fact I never met more polite, obliging, well-informed men in any similar position. Certainly they could give many points to hotel managers and clerks in England and Australia. The waiters, too, both white and black, must have vastly improved. The white waiter in America, as I found him, is quite the smartest, most intelligent, and, in his own manly way, the most polite of his class—a class very well typified by the bugler of the _St. Louis_. His coloured _confrère_ does his work deftly, silently, and well. Kipling relates a conversation which took place in the Palace Hotel between a coloured waiter and himself, in which George—every servant in America whose name you don’t know is George—made the remark: