Chicago this morning, I found awaiting me at the Grand
Pacific Hotel, a letter from my impresario. Here is the purport of it:

I know you have with you a trunk and a small portmanteau. I would
advise you to leave your trunk at the Grand Pacific, and to take with
you only the portmanteau, while you are in the neighborhood of
Chicago. You will thus save trouble, expense, etc.

On looking at my route, I found that the "neighborhood of Chicago"
included St. Paul, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland,
Cincinnati, Indianapolis: something like a little two-thousand-mile tour
"in the neighborhood of Chicago," to be done in about one week.

When I confided my troubles to my American friends, I got little
sympathy from them.

"That's quite right," they would say; "we call the neighborhood of a
city any place which, by starting after dinner, you can reach at about
breakfast time the next day. You dine, you go on board the car, you
have a smoke, you go to bed, you sleep, you wake up, you dress--and
there you are. Do you see?"

After all you may be of this opinion, if you do not reckon sleeping
time. But I do reckon it, when I have to spend the night in a closed
box, six feet long, and three feet wide, and about two feet high, and
especially when the operation has to be repeated three or four times a
week.

* * * * *

And the long weary days that are not spent in traveling, how can they be
passed, even tolerably, in an American city, where the lonely lecturer
knows nobody, and where there is absolutely nothing to be seen beyond
the hotels and the dry-goods stores? Worse still: he sometimes has the
good luck to make the acquaintance of some charming people: but he has
hardly had time to fix their features in his memory, when he has to go,
probably never to see them again.

The lecturer speaks for an hour and a half on the platform every
evening, the rest of his time is exclusively devoted to keeping silence.
Poor fellow! how grateful he is to the hotel clerk who sometimes--alas,
very seldom--will chat with him for a few minutes. As a rule the hotel
clerk is a mute, who assigns a room to you, or hands you the letters
waiting for you in the box corresponding to your number. His mouth is
closed. He may have seen you for half a minute only; he will remember
you. Even in a hotel accommodating over a thousand guests, he will know
you, he will know the number of your room, but he won't