Egypt -- Description and travel -- Humor; London (England) -- Description and travel -- Humor; Voyages and travels -- Humor
"Do you know why all those folks are flockin' over there?" he asked.
"Goin' after their tea. Tea! Turnin' their backs on a football game
to go and get a cup of tea! Why, that tea thing over there is worse
than the liquor habit. Do you know, when the final judgment day comes
and Gabriel blows his horn and all of humanity is bunched up, waitin'
for the sheep to be cut out from the goats and put into a separate
corral, some Englishman will look at his watch and discover that it's
five o'clock and then the whole British nation will turn its back on
the proceedings and go off looking for tea."
After we had stood in the rain for about an hour someone told Mr.
Peasley that one team or the other had won by three goals to nothing,
and we followed the moist throng out through the big gates.
"Come with me," said Mr. Peasley, "and I will take you to the only dry
place in London."
So we descended to the "tuppenny tube."
CHAPTER IV
HOW IT FEELS TO GET INTO LONDON
AND THEN BE ENGULFED.
One good thing about London is that, in spite of its enormous size, you
are there when you arrive. Take Chicago, by way of contrast. If you
arrive in Chicago along about the middle of the afternoon you may be at
the station by night.
The stranger heading into Chicago looks out of the window at a country
station and sees a policeman standing on the platform. Beyond is a
sign indicating that the wagon road winding away toward the sunset is
287th street, or thereabouts.
"We are now in Chicago," says someone who has been over the road before.
The traveller, surprised to learn that he has arrived at his
destination, puts his magazine and travelling cap into the valise,
shakes out his overcoat, calls on the porter to come and brush him, and
then sits on the end of the seat waiting for the brakeman to announce
the terminal station. After a half-hour of intermittent suburbs and
glorious sweeps of virgin prairie he begins to think that there is some
mistake, so he opens his valise and takes out the magazine and reads
another story.
Suddenly he looks out of the window and notices that the train has
entered the crowded city. He puts on his overcoat, picks up his valise
and stands in the aisle, so as to be ready to step right off as soon as
the train stops.
The train passes street after street and rattles through grimy yards
and past towering elevators, and in ten minutes the traveller tires of
standing and goes back to his seat. The porter comes and brushes him
again, and he looks out at several viaducts leading over to a skyline
of factories and breweries, and begins to see the masts of ships poking
up in the most unexpected places. At last, when he has looked at what
seems to be one hundred miles of architectural hash floating in smoke
and has begun to doubt that there is a terminal station, he hears the
welcome call, "Shuh-kawgo!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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