I thought sixteen shillings and eightpence a good deal for a room, but I found that the room was really a suite, a big bed-sitting-room, beautifully furnished, with bathroom, lavatory, and clothes-cupboard attached. The next morning I had a shine which cost fivepence, but that shine lasted all the way to San Francisco. The boots simply needed dusting and they were as bright as ever. Then I went and had a shilling shave, and found that the American shave is to the English one as a Turkish bath is to a cold tub; and so on throughout. You spend more money, far more, than in England, but you get a great deal more for it. But to this rule there is one great and glorious exception, and that is railway travelling. I presented my ordinary first-class tickets at the booking-office in the Central Depôt, and then came from the lips of the keen-faced, but most polite and obliging clerk, the inevitable “five dollars please—and if you’re going on the South-Western Limited it will be one dollar more. You see this is one of the fastest trains in the world, and we keep it select. You’ll have a section to yourself all the way.” I checked my trunk in the baggage-office and said a thankful good-bye to it for three thousand two hundred miles, after buying a new strap for it, which, curiously enough, was not a dollar, but seventy-five cents. Then I took possession of my cosy corner in the long, luxuriously furnished car to be whirled over a thousand miles of iron road in twenty-three hours and a half. Soon after we had pulled out of New York and the bogey wheels had begun the deep-voiced hum which was to last day and night for the inside of a week, I saw something which struck me again and again in the run across the continent. A big American city is like a robe of cloth of gold with a frayed and tattered border of dirty cotton. Its outskirts are unutterably ragged and squalid. A few minutes after you leave the splendid streets and squares of Central New York you are running through a region of mean and forlorn-looking wooden huts—really, they can hardly be called houses—crowded up together in terraces or blocks beside broad, unpaved roads, which may some day be streets, or standing in little lots of their own, scraps of unkempt land, too small for fields, and as much like gardens as a dumping-ground for London rubbish. All the houses wanted painting, and most of them repairing. The whole aspect was one of squalid poverty and mean discomfort. But these soon fell behind the flying wheels of the South-Western Limited. Another region was entered, a region of stately pleasure-houses standing amidst broad, well-wooded lands, and presently the great train swept with a stately swing round a sloping curve, and then began one of the loveliest railway runs in the world, the seventy-mile-an-hour spin along the level, four-track road which lies beside the eastern bank of the broad and beautiful Hudson.