48 SUNSHINE AND SPORT IN 



smoothly as the tides. Now I know better, for in 

 my one week of acquaintance with American rail- 

 roads, two-thirds of my baggage, checked through 

 to Punta Gorda, in Florida, from Jacksonville, was 

 left behind at Lakeland, entailing on me great 

 inconvenience. Americans may think that I 

 romance, but I call to witness the baggage-clerk 

 at Punta Gorda, who took great trouble in helping 

 me recover my own, and who bore undeserved 

 reproaches with a meekness certainly un-American 

 and almost more than human. As very little luggage 

 indeed is allowed on the cars, the conductor ob- 

 jecting to anything more than a "grip" (i.e. 

 portmanteau), there remains to the traveller only 

 the more expensive alternative of sending on 

 his belongings by one or other of the Express 

 Companies. 



The immense distances covered in railway 

 journeys in America account for all, or almost all, 

 the difference between travel there and in England. 

 From a glance at its map, I imagine, though I offer 

 the suggestion with reservation, that the Southern 

 Railroad alone uses as much permanent way as all 

 the main lines in England put together. That 

 system, which has its offices in a palace on 

 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, took me a 

 thousand miles in a couple of days. It penetrates 

 into districts remote and unpeopled, through thick 

 forest, luxuriant savannah and sandy wilderness. 

 For hundreds of miles the rails push their way 

 through hostile vegetation, or lie on loose sand. 

 So light is the passenger traffic during some 

 portions of the year that it would not pay to build 

 a double track to these outposts of civilisation, and, 



