Tramcars are worked by electricity, by steam, by horses and mules, and by revolving endless cables.  Telephones are everywhere.  The railway journeys in America often occupying several days, the tickets are a kind of succession of coupons, parts of which have to be given up at various stages.  Caution is exercised in selling railway tickets for long journeys—­thus, you are required to sign the ticket, and observations are made of you, such as your height, probable age, colour of your eyes, hair, etc.  Some of the lines of railway are not fenced in, not even in towns, so that the train runs through a town as openly as does an omnibus.  I may convey some idea of some of the large American systems of agriculture, by referring to the estate of one of my clients, Mr. C.H.  Huffman, of Merced, California.  This gentleman has fields ranging from 1,000 to 15,000 acres each.  He can plough 400 to 500 acres a day.  By his traction engine he can strike 12 furrows at a time.  He can put 70 teams (of eight mules or horses each) to work at one time.  Each harvester will cut, thrash, and sack an average of 50 acres a day.  The front part of the machine faces the standing wheat in the field, in the centre of the machine it is thrashed and winnowed, and at the rear it is thrown out in sacks ready for market.  Mr. Huffman can sit in his study at home, and by his telephone talk to his clerks at Merced (he is the banker there), as well as to the foremen at his various ranches for 25 miles round the country.  I particularly noticed one of his fields of wheat, comprising 2,000 acres, as level and clean as a well-kept lady’s flower garden in England.

The Americans have a greater variety of foods served at their meals than we do, but I never got the flavour of meat cut from a joint to equal that which, when really well roasted and served, we get in England.  As to bread, I never tasted bread worth the name, from the time I left London to the time I returned to it.  Alike on the Cunard steamers, cars, hotels, etc., you can get no wholemeal bread.  French and Vienna breads, and other very white abortions of that kind are obtainable in abundance, and even a kind of brown bread, and “Graham’s” bread, but good honest wholemeal bread, containing all the properties of the full kernel of the wheat, it is impossible to get, and this to me was a very great deprivation, as my principal article of food is real wholemeal bread.

The system of the custody of letters at the large American hotels appeared to me rather unsafe.  A visitor asks for letters, whereupon there are handed to him all the letters in the pigeon-hole marked with the initial of which the visitor’s name commences.  The visitor then proceeds to look through them, and takes what he chooses, and hands the rest back.  The official is too busy, or it is not customary for him, to look through them for the visitor, or even to watch the visitor in his process of selection.