prosperity' must be exciting to a
foreigner who sees it for the first time; but we Yankees are to the
manner born and bred up. We take it all as a matter of course, as the
young Plutuses do their father's fine house and horses and servants.
Kingsley says there is a great, unspoken poetry in sanitary reform. It
may be so; but as yet the words only suggest sewers, ventilation, and
chloride of lime. The poetry has not yet become vocal; and I think the
same may be said of our 'material progress.' It seems thus far very
prosaic. 'Only a great poet sees the poetry of his own age,' we are
told. We every-day people are unfortunately blind to it."

Here I was silent. I had dived into the deepest recesses of my soul.
Thompson waited patiently until I should rise to the surface and blow
again. It was thus:--

"Have you not noticed that the people we sit beside in railway cars are
becoming as much alike as their brown linen 'dusters,' and unsuggestive
except on that point of statistics? They are intelligent, but they carry
their shops on their backs, as snails do their houses. Their thoughts
are fixed upon the one great subject. On all others, politics included,
they talk from hand to mouth, offering you a cold hash of their favorite
morning paper. Even those praiseworthy persons who devote their time to
temperance, missions, tract-societies, seem more like men of business
than apostles. They lay their charities before you much as they would
display their goods, and urge their excellence and comparative cheapness
to induce you to lay out your money.

"The fact is, that the traveller is daily losing his human character,
and becoming more and more a package, to be handled, stowed, and
'forwarded' as may best suit the convenience and profit of the
enterprising parties engaged in the business. If at night he stops at a
hotel, he rises to the dignity of an animal, is marked by a number, and
driven to his food and litter by the herdsmen employed by the master of
the establishment. To a thinking man, it is a sad indication for the
future to see what slaves this hotel-railroad-steamboat system has made
of the brave and the free when they travel. How they toady captains and
conductors, and without murmuring put up with any imposition they please
to practise upon them, even unto taking away their lives! As we all pay
the same price at hotels, each one hopes by smirks and servility to
induce the head-clerk to treat him a little better than