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Strick 190

Americans are great travellers. It almost appears as if there was something in the air of America which makes me think lightly of distances however great. I heard a Lady at Washington talking of starting in a few days for California - a journey of more than five thousand miles - as if it involved no more than a journey from London to Edinburgh. I met another Lady at a dinner table at? New Orleans who had only that day arrived from New York, a distance of nearly fifteen hundred miles; & I entered Denver with two Ladies who had been traveling continuously for about two thousand miles each; One from some New England town, & the other from New York. But I was never made so sensible of an Americans disregard of distance, & of the slightness? of the provocation needed for inducing him to undertake a journey, as I was by an invitation I received from a gentleman to accompany him one hundred & fifty miles out, and of course as many back nerely to hear a Preacher he thought well of, & who he understood wd be only at that distance from Memphis on Sunday. Now this gentleman was a Lawyer who had come all this distance from Detroit to Memphis on the previous day, on some matter of business, & wd have to start on his return to Monday evening; & this was the way in which he spent the Sunday that intervened between two such long journeys, adding three hundred miles to what anyone but an American wd have thought was already a great deal too much travelling.