New York, and that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I found
it rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon counter, as a sight,
took my fancy more. Here it was, the free-luncheon counter of which the
European reads--generously loaded, and much freer than the air.

"Have something?"

I would not. They could shame me into drinking coffee, but they could
not shame me into eating corned beef and granite biscuits at eleven
o'clock at night. The Poland water sufficed me.

We swept perilously off again into the welter. That same evening three
of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole
in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one of
them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went
scatheless. Such are the hazards of life.... We arrived at a terminus.
And it was a great terminus. A great terminus is an inhospitable place.
And just here, in the perfection of the manner in which my minutest
comfort was studied and provided for, I began to appreciate the
significance of American hospitality--that combination of eager
good-nature, Oriental lavishness, and sheer brains. We had time to
spare. Close to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit, for
all my straining out of the window of the cab, I had been unable to
descry. I said that I should really like to see the top of that hotel.
No sooner said than done. I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen. We
went into the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agreeable
and lively young dandy bought three cigars out of millions of cigars.
Naught but bank-notes seemed to be current. The European has an awe of
bank-notes, whatever their value.