notable already among the public palaces of the world, failed to strike
his imagination with the appeal of the Palace Hotel, San Francisco; the
truth being that New York, first in the field by a couple of centuries,
had not yet begun, like Milton's eagle, to mew her mighty youth.
It would assuredly be interesting to those who knew and loved the queen
city of the Atlantic nearly a quarter of a century ago if Power's
revised and corrected opinions might be quoted now. But the chronicle of
a man's life ought to be accurate before it is picturesque, and the
truth is that the heat-wave which was then withering the whole Eastern
seaboard kept this visitor from breezy Colorado pent within the marble
halls of the Waldorf Hotel, save when urgent need drove him forth. That
particular scourge of high temperature was destined to become
historical. The thermometer soared up beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit;
hundreds of people were stricken daily by heat apoplexy; the hospitals
were crammed to their utmost capacity; the asphalt pavement, where it
existed, showed ruts like a muddy road in the country; and it is easy to
understand why a man who had cheerfully endured 110 degrees and 115
degrees in the dry heat of the nearer Rockies should gasp for air here
like a fish out of water.
Worst of all, the horse sale was postponed. The owner of the stud and
his prospective patrons alike had flown to sea and mountain for relief.
As inquiry showed that the horse-breeder himself had gone to Newport,
Power made haste to secure a stateroom on one of the Fall River line of
steamboats, and it was on this quest that the _Puritan Maiden_, a vessel
on which folk would travel merely for the sake of describing her to
their friends, brought him to the chief summer resort of fashionable
life in America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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