Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/367

 at that hotel, the manager said he had two rooms reserved for us. They were double rooms, excellently located. Mrs. Meek and her daughter slept in one room, on two small beds, and they are grumbling because they were charged exactly what we were charged. It is so unusual for me to get the best of it that I am rather enjoying their indignation I have often heard of the extreme brightness of the nights in Africa. I cannot see that they are any brighter than the nights at home, except that there are a good many more prominent stars. In the north, we hear a great deal of the Southern Cross. We see it every night, but consider it insignificant. We are on the opposite side of the earth from Kansas, and the constellations we see there cannot be seen here. Pope, the Englishman, in describing great distance, wrote: "Far as the polar walk or milky way." The people in Africa don't understand the sentence: the milky way cannot be seen here, nor is our big dipper visible Tonight at ten o'clock, before going to bed, I went forward into the dining-car to get a drink of water, and found the car full of men drinking; a custom more common in this country than at home. The English laugh at our American habit of drinking ice-water. There is a certain Hot Water much worse, known as John Barleycorn, and Englishmen drink too much of it Poor Mrs. Atterbury, who has lived in South Africa nineteen years without a sight of her old home in St. Joseph, Missouri, says she longs to go home in order that she may again see pretty girls and babies. Mrs. Meek, our traveling acquaintance, who has always lived in the Transvaal, admits that pretty girls and babies