[The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, by Murat Halstead]@TWC D-Link bookThe Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, CHAPTER III 1/20
CHAPTER III. From Long Island To Luzon. Across the Continent--An American Governor-General Steams Through the Golden Gate--He Is a Minute-Man--Honolulu as a Health Resort--The Lonesome Pacific--The Skies of Asia--Dreaming Under the Stars of the Scorpion--The Southern Cross. Spain, crowded between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, was the world's "West" for many centuries, indeed until Columbus found a further West, but he did not go far enough to find the East Indies.
The United States is now at work in both the East and West Indies. Our Manila expeditions steamed into the sunsets, the boys pointing out to each other the southern cross.
The first stage of a journey, to go half round the world on a visit to our new possession, was by the annex boat from Brooklyn, and a rush on the Pennsylvania train, that glimmers with gold and has exhausted art on wheels, to Washington, to get the political latitude and longitude by observation of the two domes, that of the Capitol, and the library, and the tremendous needle of snow that is the monument to Washington, and last, but not least, the superb old White House. The next step was across the mountains on the Baltimore and Ohio, the short cut between the East and the West, traversed so often by George Washington to get good land for the extension of our national foundations.
The space between Cincinnati and Chicago is cleared on the "Big Four" with a bound through the shadow of the earth, between two rare days in June, and the next midnight, the roaring train flew high over the Missouri River at Omaha, and by daylight far on the way to Ogden.
The country was rich in corn and grass, and when one beholds the fat cattle, lamentations for the lost buffalo cease.
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