already experienced the sirocco-like heat of the Red
Sea throughout its whole length, from Adin to Suez, the prospect of a
second journey in that exhausting region was anything but attractive.
The Atlantic Ocean was therefore crossed to the westward, and a fair
start made from much nearer home; namely, by the American Central
Pacific route.

The journey by rail across our own continent was easily accomplished in
one week of day-and-night travel, covering a distance of thirty-four
hundred miles from Boston to San Francisco. Comfortable sleeping-cars
obviate the necessity of stopping by the way for bodily rest, provided
the traveller be physically strong and in good health. On a portion of
the road one not only retires at his usual hour, but he also breakfasts,
dines, and enjoys nearly all the domestic conveniences in the train,
while it is moving at a rate varying from thirty-five to forty-five
miles per hour, in such well-adjusted cars as hardly to realize that he
is all the time being rapidly and surely forwarded to his destination.

The pleasing variety of scenery presented to the eyes of the watchful
traveller from the car windows is extremely interesting and peculiarly
American, embracing peaceful, widespread, fertile fields, valleys of
exquisite verdure, foaming torrents and mountain gorges, together with
Alpine ranges worthy of Switzerland. Now the route skirts the largest
lakes on the face of the globe, navigated by mammoth steam ships; now
follows the silvery course of some broad river, or crosses a great
commercial water-way, hundreds of feet above its surface, by iron
bridges skilfully hung in air. For scores of miles the road may run
parallel with some busy canal crowded with heavily-laden barges, slowly
making their way to market. Besides winding through mountain gorges,
plains, parks, and primeval forests, one passes _en route_ through grand
and populous cities numbering half a million and more of people each, as
well as through pleasant towns, thrifty villages, pioneer hamlets, and
Indian reservations, where the plains are as far-reaching as the open
sea, the blue of the sky overhead and the yellow buffalo-grass which
carpets the earth forming the only blending colors,--until by and by a
distant glimpse of the waters of the Pacific signifies that the
land-journey draws near its close, and soon after the young but
wonderful giant city of the West, San Francisco, is reached.

Five years had elapsed since