in the cars. A communicative
friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a railroad
journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself
agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many
times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an
hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations
into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in
curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous
experiment,--fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when
a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,--all this without
volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as
the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound
up,--many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum
with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend,
cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and
opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the
flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old
weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and
attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry
during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of
fresh juices. My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced
by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the
exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in
what we know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it
pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near
objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones. Looking from a
right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly
backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not appear
to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if
they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape
becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the
middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and
longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied
them. We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The
traveller who supposes that he is