Book Description

Excerpt from Seven Legs Across the Seas: A Printer's Impressions, of Many Lands I was early aboard the fastest ship that ever foamed the seas. Later, a long, strong whistle blast blew - the signal for starting - and soon she headed southward, the great vessel traveling through New York harbor to Sandy Hook as noiselessly as a bobsleigh drawn through two feet of unpacked snow. I had secured a second class ticket to Buenos Aires, Argentina, by way of England, this marking the first of several legs of the world over which I had planned to travel. Thirteen hundred and fifty dollars, representing years of economical living, was the sum deemed as necessary to accomplish what I had purposed doing. By trade I am a printer and linotype operator. In earlier years money for traveling expenses was of little concern, for the fascination that accompanies prowling about freight trains seeking an empty box car, or the open end door of a loaded one in which to steal a ride, or of turning ones back to the tender of a locomotive to protect the eyes from hot cinders coming from a snorting passenger engine while standing on the draughty platform of a "blind" baggage car - one without end doors - the train at the same time traveling at a speed of from 45 to 50 miles an hour - the "cinder days" during the catch-as-catch-can periods of traveling through coastwise tracts of country, across unbroken prairie stretches and over mountain fastnesses, are pleasant ones to recall, not forgetting the hungry, cold and wet spells that all men meet with who are enticed by the gritty allurements to beat their way about the country on railroad trains. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.