by Mark Twain
You're reading from chapter 12. Previously
Once I crossed the plains and deserts and mountains of the West in a stagecoach, from the Missouri line to California, and since then all my pleasure trips must be measured to that rare holiday frolic. Two thousand miles of ceaseless rush and rattle and clatter, by night and by day, and never a weary moment, never a lapse of interest!The first seven hundred miles a level continent, its grassy carpet greener and softer and smoother than any sea and figured with designs fitted to its magnitude--the shadows of the clouds. Here were no scenes but summer scenes, and no disposition inspired by them but to lie at full length on the mail sacks in the grateful breeze and dreamily smoke the pipe of peace--what other, where all was repose and contentment? In cool mornings, before the sun was fairly up, it was worth a lifetime of city toiling and moiling to perch in the foretop with the driver and see the six mustangs scamper under the sharp snapping of the whip that never touched them; to scan the blue distances of a world that knew no lords but us; to cleave the wind with uncovered head and feel the sluggish pulses rousing to the spirit of a speed that pretended to the resistless rush of a typhoon! Then thirteen hundred miles of desert solitudes; of limitless panoramas of bewildering perspective; of mimic cities, of pinnacled cathedrals, of massive fortresses, counterfeited in the eternal rocks and splendid with the crimson and gold of the setting sun; of dizzy altitudes among fog-wreathed peaks and never-melting snows, where thunders and lightnings and tempests warred magnificently at our feet and the storm clouds above swung their shredded banners in our very faces! But I forgot. I am in elegant France now, and not scurrying through the great South Pass and the Wind River Mountains, among antelopes and buffaloes and painted Indians on the warpath. It is not meet that I should make too disparaging comparisons between humdrum travel on a railway and that royal summer flight across a continent in a stagecoach. I meant in the beginning to say that railway journeying is tedious and tiresome, and so it is--though at the time I was thinking particularly of a dismal fifty-hour pilgrimage between New York and St. Louis. Of course our trip through France was not really tedious because all its scenes and experiences were new and strange; but as Dan says, it had its "discrepancies."
Continued next week. Tomorrow's installment from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.
This travelogue cemented this rising author's reputation when it was published in 1869.
Chapter Summary: A Holiday Flight through France--Summer Garb of the Landscape—Abroad on the Great Plains-- Peculiarities of French Cars--French Politeness American Railway Officials--"Twenty Mnutes to Dinner!"--Why there are no Accidents--The "Old Travellers"--Still on the Wing--Paris at Last----French Order and Quiet--Place of the Bastile--Seeing the Sights --A Barbarous Atrocity--Absurd Billiards
Photo: Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) by Matthew Brady Feb. 7, 1871.
More information here:
| Check the right column | More of this Series |
No comments:
Post a Comment