CHAPTER III

From Long Island To Luzon.

Across the Continent—­An American Governor-General Steams Through the Golden Gate—­He Is a Minute-Man—­Honolulu as a Health Resort—­The Lonesome Pacific—­The Skies of Asia—­Dreaming Under the Stars of the Scorpion—­The Southern Cross.

Spain, crowded between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, was the world’s “West” for many centuries, indeed until Columbus found a further West, but he did not go far enough to find the East Indies.  The United States is now at work in both the East and West Indies.

Our Manila expeditions steamed into the sunsets, the boys pointing out to each other the southern cross.  The first stage of a journey, to go half round the world on a visit to our new possession, was by the annex boat from Brooklyn, and a rush on the Pennsylvania train, that glimmers with gold and has exhausted art on wheels, to Washington, to get the political latitude and longitude by observation of the two domes, that of the Capitol, and the library, and the tremendous needle of snow that is the monument to Washington, and last, but not least, the superb old White House.

The next step was across the mountains on the Baltimore and Ohio, the short cut between the East and the West, traversed so often by George Washington to get good land for the extension of our national foundations.  The space between Cincinnati and Chicago is cleared on the “Big Four” with a bound through the shadow of the earth, between two rare days in June, and the next midnight, the roaring train flew high over the Missouri River at Omaha, and by daylight far on the way to Ogden.  The country was rich in corn and grass, and when one beholds the fat cattle, lamentations for the lost buffalo cease.  It is a delight to see young orchards and farmhouses, and cribs and sheds fortified against tornadoes by groves, laid out with irritating precision to confront the whirling storms from west and south.  The broad bad lands in which the tempests are raised devour the heart of the continent.

I made note of the 888-mile post beyond Omaha, but the 1,000-mile telegraph pole and tree glided away while I was catching the lights and shadows on a fearfully tumbled landscape.  The alkali has poisoned enormous tracts, and the tufts of sagebrush have a huge and sinister monotony.  Looking out early in the morning there was in our track a “gaunt grey wolf” with sharp ears, unabashed by the roar of the train.  His species find occasional scraps along the track and do not fear the trains.  Then I saw something glisten in the herbage, and it was a rattlesnake, if it were not a whisky bottle.