enly as does an
omnibus. I may convey some idea of some of the large American systems
of agriculture, by referring to the estate of one of my clients, Mr.
C.H. Huffman, of Merced, California. This gentleman has fields ranging
from 1,000 to 15,000 acres each. He can plough 400 to 500 acres a day.
By his traction engine he can strike 12 furrows at a time. He can put 70
teams (of eight mules or horses each) to work at one time. Each
harvester will cut, thrash, and sack an average of 50 acres a day. The
front part of the machine faces the standing wheat in the field, in the
centre of the machine it is thrashed and winnowed, and at the rear it is
thrown out in sacks ready for market. Mr. Huffman can sit in his study
at home, and by his telephone talk to his clerks at Merced (he is the
banker there), as well as to the foremen at his various ranches for 25
miles round the country. I particularly noticed one of his fields of
wheat, comprising 2,000 acres, as level and clean as a well-kept lady's
flower garden in England.

The Americans have a greater variety of foods served at their meals than
we do, but I never got the flavour of meat cut from a joint to equal
that which, when really well roasted and served, we get in England. As
to bread, I never tasted bread worth the name, from the time I left
London to the time I returned to it. Alike on the Cunard steamers, cars,
hotels, etc., you can get no wholemeal bread. French and Vienna breads,
and other very white abortions of that kind are obtainable in abundance,
and even a kind of brown bread, and "Graham's" bread, but good honest
wholemeal bread, containing all the properties of the full kernel of the
wheat, it is impossible to get, and this to me was a very great
deprivation, as my _principal_ article of food is _real_ wholemeal
bread.

The system of the custody of letters at the large American hotels
appeared to me rather unsafe. A visitor asks for letters, whereupon
there are handed to him all the letters in the pigeon-hole marked with
the initial of which the visitor's name commences. The visitor then
proceeds to look through them, and takes what he chooses, and hands the
rest back. The official is too busy, or it is not customary for him, to
look through them for the visitor, or even to watch the visitor in his
process of selection. I noticed one gentleman with a packet of letters,
I should think considerably over a hundred, every now and then slip one
into his breast po