pronounces beautiful, there are no more hideous monstrosities on
the face of the earth than train, trolley, and automobile; but
each generation has its own standard of beauty, though it seldom
confesses it. We say and actually persuade ourselves that we
admire the Parthenon; in reality we admire the mammoth factory and
the thirty-story office building. Strive as we may to deceive
ourselves by loud protestations, our standards are not the
standards of old. We like best the things we have; we may call
things ugly, but we think them beautiful, for they are part of
us,--and the automobile fits into our surroundings like a pocket
in a coat. We may turn up our noses at it or away from it, as the
case may be, but none the less it is the perambulator of the
twentieth century."
It was exactly one o'clock when we pulled up near the City Hall.
Total time from Erie five hours and fifty minutes, actual running
time five hours, distance by road about ninety-four miles.
CHAPTER SIX BUFFALO
THE MIDWAY
Housing the machine in a convenient and well-appointed stable for
automobiles, we were reminded of the fact that we had arrived in
Buffalo at no ordinary time, by a charge of three dollars per
night for storage, with everything else extra. But was it not the
Exposition we had come to see? and are not Expositions
proverbially expensive--to promoters and stockholders as well as
visitors?
Then, too, the hotels of Buffalo had expected so much and were so
woefully disappointed. Vast arrays of figures had been compiled
showing that within a radius of four hundred miles of Buffalo
lived all the people in the United States who were worth knowing.
The statistics were not without their foundation in fact, but
therein lay the weakness of the entire scheme so far as hotels
were concerned; people lived so near they could leave home in the
morning with a boiled egg and a sandwich, see the Exposition and
get back at night. Travellers passing through would stop over
during the day and evening, then go their way on a midnight
train,--it was cheaper to ride in a Pullman than stay in Buffalo.
We might have taken rooms at Rochester, running back and forth
each day in the machine,--though Rochester was by no means beyond
the zone of exorbitant charges. Notions of value become very much
congested within a radius of two or three hundred miles of any
great Exposition.
The Exposition was well worth seeing in parts by day and as a
Here's a piece of wisdom on driving or cute car quote to study:
I feel like I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe. ~Author Unknown
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