one-night stands at fourth-rate hotels, or live on alkali water and
bacon, and let him travel seven thousand miles over a country where
a real-estate office, a Citizen’s Bank, and Quick Order Restaurant,
with a few surrounding houses, make, as seen from the car-window, a
booming city, where beautiful scenery and grand mountains are separated
by miles of prairie and chaparral, and where there is no Diana of the
Tower nor bronze Farragut to greet him daily as he comes back from work
through Madison Square. He will then feel a love for New York equal to
the Chicagoan’s love for _his_ city, and when he sees across the New
Jersey flats the smoke and the tall buildings and the twin spires of
the cathedral, he will wish to shout, as the cowboys do when they “come
into town,” at being back again in the only place where one can both
hear the Tough Girl of the East Side ask for her shoes, and the horn of
the Country Club’s coach tooting above the roar of the Avenue.
The West is a very wonderful, large, unfinished, and out-of-doors
portion of our country, and a most delightful place to _visit_. I
would advise every one in the East to visit it, and I hope to revisit
it myself. Some of those who go will not only visit it, but will make
their homes there, and the course of empire will eventually Westward
take its way. But when it does, it will leave one individual behind it
clinging closely to the Atlantic seaboard.
Little old New York is good enough for him.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.