The Democratic advocate. [volume] (Westminster, Md.) 1865-1972, 1886-10-09
areat Things to Be Seen in America.

From the Chicago Western World
A leading journal strikes true chord
when it asks the question: els it in order
to see walled towns that they (the intend
ing trayeler) would have gone to Europe?
Where will they come across one more to
lea, where udebac Sifs dh hrfGtas sf6efrA af Aver
looking her mighty river, with view that
has few rivals in the world, with ramparts
and citadel, her medieval streets and
dwellings, her cathedrals and converts, and
strange schools and foreign tongues and
immortal histories? Is it only ancient
cities they desire? Then there is st.
Augustine among its palmettcs beside the
sea, almost at the extremity of the CONT
nent and almost as old as the discovery of
the continent. Is it semitropical beauty
of landscape and weather they would
have? Not all the soft-vapored cities by
the Mediterranean will offer them more
than Savannah and the Sea Islands
"Is it foreign life they want? Where
will anything more alien to all our north
ern and eastern experience be seen or heard
than in the Rue Royale and the Rue
Bourbon, at the French market or at the
Spanish Fort of New Orleans, with its
mocking birds and magnolias, where, as
late as the middle of June, gardens full of
jasmine and oleanders, cape myrtles and
palms, with moonlight that might be the
northen sun filtered through domes of
crystals, make one doubt if it be plain,
matter-of-fact, progressive America? Or
xulNa Inis ha
seen than in the Texas town of San Anto-
MO, where the roses lie on the red roofs of
the long and low dwellings,, where the
jalousies are latticed with the vine of the
night-blooming cereus, where the banana
trees blow to ribbons in the strong, sweet
southeast gales, and the lanes are lined
with figs and apricots. and one walks under
avenues of stately pecans; where forests,
draped in melancholy moss, swaying heav-
lily, make the landscape all unreal; where
grapevines interlace the thickets with stems
the size of forest trees themselves; where
the priests go about with hocks of little
children clinging to their skirts, and where
the ruins of the old missions rival in sculp-
tured wonder many ruins of old Spain?
Or is it absolute Spain itself that our
friends would travel over? Let them cross
the Rio Grande by rail, and in chihuahua
and Sonora and the heart of Mexico they
have reached much that makes old Spain;
they have found the old Spain of 400
years ago, and have gone there dryshod.
''Do our travellers want deserts aud thirst
for their summer experience? They will
find deserts in Arizona rivaling all Africa,
with colors and mirages that even the
Sahel does not give Do they pant for
mountain-climbing? IF the White Noun
tains and the Alleghanies do not offer
difficulties enough, are there not Mount st.
Elias, with its 1900 feet of altitude,
Shasta and Whitney, the terribly obstruct-
ed heights of Sogris and of Snow Mass
Peak, all the wild SUBMITS of the Sierras,
the fearful beauty of the Yellowstone park,
and the wild grandeur, too lovely to be
terrible, of the Yosemite? And do the
Danube, the Rhine, the Nile allure? Then
shall not the waters of the Hudson, with
its picturesque reaches, of the Mississippi,
with its breadth and volume, of the Co
lumbia, with its gorges and cataracts, wash
out all memory OF lesser and less beautiful
streams
"Where, for mere beauty, for the de-
light of the eye, can all Europe show us
anything like blossoming prairie, through
which we may ride all day and never come
to the end of the blossoming? And what
hoary antiquity to charm the thought back
to the source of races has Europe to offer
that shall outdo the ancientness of the
ruins of our prehistoric peoples in the
heart of the continent? In fact, America
is so full of historic interest and pictures
que loveliness that it is wonderful anybody
should wish to visit Europe at all before
exhausting it; and if anything happens to
deter people from crossing the ocean and
incites them to become acquainted with
their own territory, they cannot be the
losers by it."