roads.

On to Boston next morning, now only forty miles away, I pass venerable
weather-worn mile-stones, set up in old colonial days, when the Great
West, now trailed across with the rubber hoof-marks of "the popular steed
of today," was a pathless wilderness, and on the maps a blank. Striking
the famous "sand-papered roads " at Framingham - which, by the by, ought
to be pumice-stoned a little to make them as good for cycling as stretches
of gravelled road near Springfield, Sandwich, and Piano, Ill.; La Porte,
and South Bend, Ind.; Mentor, and Willoughby, O.; Girard, Penn.; several
places on the ridge road between Erie and Buffalo, and the alkali flats
of the Rocky Mountain territories. Soon the blue intellectual haze
hovering over " the Hub " heaves in sight, and, at two o'clock in the
afternoon of August 4th, I roll into Boston, and whisper to the wild
waves of the sounding Atlantic what the sad sea-waves of the Pacific
were saying when I left there, just one hundred and three and a half
days ago, having wheeled about 3,700 miles to deliver the message. Passing
the winter of 1884-85 in New York, I became acquainted with the Outing
Magazine, contributed to it sketches of my tour across America, and in
the Spring of 1885 continued around the world as its special correspondent;
embarking April 9th from New York, for Liverpool, aboard the City of
Chicago.






CHAPTER V.