as to finish his task before the
part first written was entirely obsolete.

The process of change in the United States goes on so rapidly that the
attempt of a guidebook to keep abreast of the times (not easy in any
country) becomes almost futile. The speed with which Denver
metamorphosed her outward appearance has already been commented on at
page 214; and this is but one instance in a thousand. Towns spring up
literally in a night. McGregor in Texas, at the junction of two new
railways, had twelve houses the day after it was fixed upon as a town
site, and in two months contained five hundred souls. Towns may also
disappear in a night, as Johnstown (Penn.) was swept away by the
bursting of a dam on May 31, 1889, or as Chicago was destroyed by the
great fire of 1871. These are simply exaggerated examples of what is
happening less obtrusively all the time. The means of access to points
of interest are constantly changing; the rough horse-trail of to-day
becomes the stage-road of to-morrow and the railway of the day after.
The conservative clinging to the old, so common in Europe, has no
place in the New World; an apparently infinitesimal advantage will
occasion a _bouleversement_ that is by no means infinitesimal.

Next to the interest and beauty of the places to be visited, perhaps
the two things in which a visitor to a new country has most concern
are the means of moving from point to point and the accommodation
provided for him at his nightly stopping-places--in brief, its
conveyances and its inns. During the year or more I spent in almost
continuous travelling in the United States I had abundant opportunity
of testing both of these. In all I must have slept in over two hundred
different beds, ranging from one in a hotel-chamber so gorgeous that
it seemed almost as indelicate to go to bed in it as to undress in the
drawing-room, down through the berths of Pullman cars and river
steamboats, to an open-air couch of balsam boughs in the Adirondack
forests. My means of locomotion included a safety bicycle, an
Adirondack canoe, the back of a horse, the omnipresent buggy, a
bob-sleigh, a "cutter," a "booby," four-horse "stages," river, lake,
and sea-going steamers, horse-cars, cable-cars, electric cars,
mountain elevators, narrow-gauge railways, and the Vestibuled Limited
Express from New York to Chicago.

Perhaps it is significant of the amount of truth in many of the
assertions made about travelling in the United State