Letters of Travel-Rudyard Kipling

Book One, Chapter One of Letters of Travel.

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In Sight of Monadnock.

From Letters of Travel by Rudyard Kipling.

After gloom of gray Atlantic weather, our ship came to America in a flood of winter sunshine that made unaccustomed eyelids blink.

And the New Yorker, who is nothing if not modest, said, "This isn't a sample of our really fine days.

Wait until such and such time comes, or go to such and such a quarter of the city." We were content, and more than content, to drift aimlessly up and down the brilliant streets, wondering a little why the finest light should be wasted on the worst pavements in the world, to walk round and round Madison Square, because that was full of beautifully dressed babies playing counting-out games, or to gaze reverently at the broad-shouldered, pug-nosed Irish New York policemen.

Wherever we went, there was sun, lavish and unstinted, working nine hours a day, with the color and the clean-cut lines of perspective that he makes.

That anyone should dare to call this climate muggy, yea, even subtropical, was a shock.

There came such a man, and he said, "Go north if you want weather, weather that is weather.

Go to New England." So New York passed away upon a sunny afternoon with her roar and rattle, her complex smells, her triply overheated rooms, and much too energetic inhabitants, while the train went north to the lands where the snow lay.

It came in one sweep, almost, it seemed, in one turn of the wheels, covering the winter-killed grass and turning the frozen ponds that looked so white under the shadow of lean trees into pools of ink.

As the light closed in, a little wooden town, white, cloaked, and dumb, slid past the windows, and the strong light of the car lamps fell upon a sleigh, the driver furred and muffled to his nose, turning the corner of a street.

Now, the sleigh of a picture book, however well one knows it, is altogether different from the thing in real life, a means of conveyance at a journey's end.

But it is well not to be over-curious in the matter, for the same American, who has been telling you at length how he once followed a kilted Scots soldier from Chelsea to the Tower out of pure wonder and curiosity as his bare knees and sporran, will laugh at your interest in just a cutter.

The staff of the train, surely the great American nation would be lost if deprived of the ennobling society of brakeman, conductor, Pullman car conductor, Negro porter, and newsboy, told pleasant tales, as they spread themselves at ease in the smoking compartments, of snowings up the line to Montreal, of desperate attacks, four engines together, and the snowplow in front, on drifts 30 feet high, and the pleasures of walking along the tops of goods wagons to break a train, with the thermometer 30 below freezing.

"It comes cheaper to kill men that way than to put air brakes on freight cars," said the brakeman.

30 below freezing, it was inconceivable till one stepped out into it at midnight, and the first shock of that clear, still air took away the breath, as does a plunge into seawater.

A walrus sitting on a woolpack was our host in his sleigh.

He wrapped us in hairy goatskin coats, caps that came down over our ears, buffalo robes and blankets, and yet more buffalo robes, till we too looked like walruses, and moved almost as gracefully.

The night was as keen as the edge of a newly ground sword.

Breath froze on the coat lapels in snow.

The nose became without sensation, the eyes wept bitterly because the horses were in a hurry to get home, and whirling through the air at zero brings tears.