PAINTED ROCK
there more folks in it than in the hull o' Texas? Oh, I say, it must be a place that! Though it is British I'd admire to see it. Is it a gay place? Gayer than San Antone? B'gosh I'd admire to see it, so I would."
He was never tired of talking about places that he had never seen. He differed from the average Western American of the stay-at-home variety in not believing that what he had not seen was not worth seeing. But he owned that he found it a little humiliating to have to come to an Englishman for information about Missouri and Oregon and Washington Territory.
"It ain't the same thing askin' you for pointers about your own country," he said very kindly. "It ain't up agin me any that my stock of knowledge about London and England is scanty to a painful degree, but I own it smites me hard that you know nigh on to all the States in the Union and all I know is somethin' of the Texas Panhandle, with a few tangled memories of a jamboree in San Antone and Fort Worth. I tell you, Charlie, I'm death on hittin' the road and seein' things.
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