Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/267

 *men average about $100 a month. He complained a good deal of the high cost of living in Johannesburg, but it developed that prices are not much higher here than in Atchison.

"Think of it," he said, "a good porterhouse steak costs a shilling a pound here."

Investigation will reveal that the best steaks cost twenty-four cents a pound in Atchison. The best bacon costs thirty cents a pound here; that is the price in Atchison, next door to eight or nine packing-houses. Mr. Brady has not been in Atlanta, Georgia, for fourteen years, and said to me:

"In Atlanta, we could buy good butter for fifteen cents a pound."

I told him he could not do it now, and he was greatly surprised to hear of the manner in which prices have advanced all over the United States We took a street-car ride, and the price was fifteen cents each going out, and fifteen cents each coming back, or ninety cents out and back for three of us. It was the longest street-car ride possible in Johannesburg; five sections, at three cents a section Last Fourth of July, Brady put an American flag on his trolley-pole, and it remained there peacefully from 6:30 in the morning until noon. At that hour an inspector ordered it down. Brady refused to take it down, and was suspended for three days. There is another American on the line, a motorman, and he tongue-lashed the inspector, and was also suspended for three days Brady's father was Captain in a Georgia company in the rebellion; five of his sons were killed in the battle of Manassas. Of the one hundred men who originally