Chapter 1

From Tideaway to Tideaway (1892)--

IN SIGHT OF MONADNOCK

After the gloom of gray Atlantic weather, our ship came to America in a
flood of winter sunshine that made unaccustomed eyelids blink, and the
New Yorker, who is nothing if not modest, said, 'This isn't a sample of
our really fine days. Wait until such and such times come, or go to such
and a such a quarter of the city.' We were content, and more than
content, to drift aimlessly up and down the brilliant streets, wondering
a little why the finest light should be wasted on the worst pavements in
the world; to walk round and round Madison Square, because that was full
of beautifully dressed babies playing counting-out games, or to gaze
reverently at the broad-shouldered, pug-nosed Irish New York policemen.
Wherever we went there was the sun, lavish and unstinted, working nine
hours a day, with the colour and the clean-cut lines of perspective that
he makes. That any one should dare to call this climate muggy, yea, even
'subtropical,' was a shock. There came such a man, and he said, 'Go
north if you want weather--weather that _is_ weather. Go to New
England.' So New York passed away upon a sunny afternoon, with her roar
and rattle, her complex smells, her triply over-heated rooms, and much
too energetic inhabitants, while the train went north to the lands where
the snow lay. It came in one sweep--almost, it seemed, in one turn of
the wheels--covering the winter-killed grass and turning the frozen
ponds that looked so white under the shadow of lean trees into pools of
ink.

As the light closed in, a little wooden town, white, cloaked, and dumb,
slid past the windows, and the strong light of the car lamps fell upon a
sleigh (the driver furred and muffled to his nose) turning the corner of
a street. Now the sleigh of a picture-book, however well one knows it,
is altogether different from the thing in real life, a means of
conveyance at a journey's end; but it is well not to be over-curious in
the matter, for the same American who has been telling you at length how
he once followed a kilted Scots soldier from Chelsea to the Tower, out
of pure wonder and curiosity at his bare knees and sporran, will laugh
at your interest in 'just a cutter.'

The staff of the train--surely the great American nation would be lost
if deprived of the ennobling society of brakeman, conductor, Pullman-car
conductor, negro porter, and newsboy--told pleasant tales, as they
spread themselves at ease in the smoking compartments, of snowings up
the line to Montreal, of desperate attacks--four engines together and a
snow-plough in front--on drifts thirty feet high, and the pleasures of
walking along the tops of goods wagons to brake a train, with the
thermometer