Excerpt from Rand, McNally and Co; 'S Guide to Southern California Direct: Narrative, Historical, Descriptive; With Notes on California at Large Perhaps there are few people who stop to think of the possibilities of travel in modern times, especially over some of the immense distances west of the Missouri. The luxury, the convenience, the swiftness, the certainty, and a certain colossal energy inherent in the whole, do not appear to the average man in anything like their true light, because all these things are dulled by custom. When we wish to go anywhere, we only incidentally think of the distance, because we know that no distances hinder us. We betake ourselves to the depot, after purchasing a ticket that can be procured in the remotest village, deposit ourselves and our belong ings on board the proper car, and presently go to sleep in a luxurious bed, satisfied that we shall be found all right in the morning, with facilities for breakfast, but several hun dred miles from our starting place. We do not take much trouble. Travel has become not alone or always a necessity, but often a recreation, and sometimes one of the harmless forms of dissipation. If anything happens to go wrong with the intricate and almost endless network of steel, which men have woven and miraculously control from sea to sea, and which it is one of the wonders of a wonderful age that they have made or control at all, we think strange of it as being Out of the natural order of events. 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.