This is illustrated in various ways.  It is shown, for example, in Atlanta’s principal hotels, which are not small-town hotels, or good-enough hotels, but would do credit to any city, however great.  The office buildings are city office buildings, and in the downtown section they are sufficiently numerous to look very much at home, instead of appearing a little bit exotic, self-conscious, and lonesome, as new skyscrapers do in so many cities of Atlanta’s size.  Even the smoke with which the skyscrapers are streaked is city smoke.  Chicago herself could hardly produce smoke of more metropolitan texture—­certainly not on the Lake Front, where the Illinois Central trains send up their black clouds; for Atlanta’s downtown smoke, like Chicago’s, comes in large part from railroads piercing the heart of the city.  Where downtown business streets cross the railroad tracks, the latter are depressed, the highways passing above on steel bridges resembling the bridges over the Chicago River.  The railroad’s right of way is, furthermore, just about as wide as the Chicago River, and rows of smoke-stained brick buildings turn their backs upon it, precisely as similar buildings turn theirs upon Chicago’s busy, narrow stream.  I wonder if all travelers, familiar with Chicago, are so persistently reminded of that portion of the city which is near the river, as I was by that portion of Atlanta abutting on the tracks by which the Seaboard Air Line enters the city.

Generally speaking, railroads in the South have not been so prosperous as leading roads in the North, and with the exception of the most important through trains, their passenger equipment is, therefore, not so good.  The Seaboard Air Line, however, runs an all-steel train between Atlanta and Birmingham which, in point of equipment, may be compared with the best limited trains anywhere.  The last car in this train, instead of being part sleeping car and part observation car, is a combination dining and observation car—­a very pleasant arrangement, for men are allowed to smoke in the observation end after dinner.  This is, to my mind, an improvement over the practice of most railroads, which obliges men who wish to smoke to leave the ladies with whom they may be traveling.  All Seaboard dining cars offer, aside from regular a la carte service, a sixty-cent dinner known as the “Blue Plate Special.”  This dinner has many advantages over the usual dining-car repast.  In the first place, though it does not comprise bread and butter, coffee or tea, or dessert, it provides an ample supply of meat and vegetables at a moderate price.  In the second place, though served at a fixed price, it bears no resemblance to the old-style dining car table d’hote, but, upon the contrary, looks and tastes like food.  The food, furthermore, instead of representing a great variety of viands served in microscopic helpings on innumerable platters and “side dishes,” comes on one great plate, with recesses for vegetables.  The “Blue Plate Special” furnishes, in short, the chief items in a “good home meal.”