.OTQ0.NTkwNTg

From Newberry Transcribe
Revision as of 21:35, 24 September 2019 by imported>Ezallan
Jump to navigation Jump to search

222 equal. No one is larger, or wider, or in anyway better than another. Of course, the result of this must be that there is not a unclear of difference between one town & another, all having been cast in the same mould. It wd be laughable, were it not tiresome, to have not a thousand cities in America, but one city reproduced over & over again, wherever you go. St. Louis & Cincinnati are about the same size, & have much the same kind of site, & I believe that if a man sho had spent a week in each of them were a month? afterward carried blindfold into one of them, & set down in the middle of the town, he wd be unable to say in which of the two he was. I know no two things that are so like each other, except it be two farms on the Prairie, where every farm is just the fac-simile of every other farm, so that it is really impossible to guess how one living on the Prairie, unless he develps a new sense to meet the circumstances he is placed in, can ever distinguish his own home. I venture to think that the Americans are under another mistake about their towns; they suppose that their method of parallel Streets, not named, but enumerated & lettered, is a great help to the memory, & facilitates very much the finding of any house one is in search of. Never did fallible mortals entertain so erroneous an idea. Instead of a name, Rivoli, or Cheapside, which entirely fixes itself in the mind, you have to remember a figure & letter; & as neither figures nor letter suggest ideas, the thing is impossible. In truth you have to remember