car singing college songs,--he did n't care how folks looked
if they had their tickets ready,--and minded their own business,--and, so
saying, he poked a young man upon whose shoulder a ringleted head was
reclining with that delightful abandon which the railroad train seems to
provoke in lovely woman,--"Fare!"

It is a fine thing to be set down in a great, overcrowded hotel, where
they do not know you, looking dusty, and for the moment shabby, with
nothing but a carpet-bag in your hand, feeling tired, and anything but
clean, and hungry, and worried, and every way miserable and mean, and to
undergo the appraising process of the gentleman in the office, who, while
he shoves the book round to you for your name, is making a hasty
calculation as to how high up he can venture to doom you. But Murray
Bradshaw's plain dress and carpet-bag were more than made up for by the
air and tone which imply the habit of being attended to. The clerk saw
that in a glance, and, as he looked at the name and address in the book,
spoke sharply in the explosive dialect of his tribe,--

"Jun! ta'tha'genlm'n'scarpetbag'n'showhimupt'thirtyone!"

When Cyprian Eveleth reached the same hotel late at night, he appeared in
his best clothes and with a new valise; but his amiable countenance and
gentle voice and modest manner sent him up two stories higher, where he
found himself in a room not much better than a garret, feeling lonely
enough, for he did not know he had an acquaintance in the same house.
The two young men were in and out so irregularly that it was not very
strange that they did not happen to meet each other.

The young lawyer was far more likely to find Myrtle if she were in the
city than the other, even with the help of his cousin Edward. He was not
only older, but sharper, better acquainted with the city and its ways,
and, whatever might be the strength of Cyprian's motives, his own were of
such intensity that he thought of nothing else by day, and dreamed of
nothing else by night. He went to work, therefore, in the most
systematic manner. He first visited the ship Swordfish, lying at her
wharf, saw her captain, and satisfied himself that as yet nobody at all
corresponding to the description of Myrtle Hazard had been seen by any
person on board. He visited all the wharves, inquiring on every vessel
where it seemed possible she might have been looking about. Hotels,
thoroughfares, every place where he might hear of her or meet he