l or sectional matter, and it ought not
to be a local matter unless the train stays at one end of the line all
the time. This road, however, is the one that discharged its engineer
some years ago, and when he took his time-check he said he would now go
to work for a sure-enough road with real iron rails to it, instead of
two streaks of rust on a right of way.

All night long, except when we were changing cars, we rattled along over
wobbling trestles and third mortgages. The cars were graded from
third-class down. The road itself was not graded at all.

They have the same old air in these coaches that they started out with.
Different people, with various styles of breath, have used this air and
then returned it. They are using the same air that they did before the
war. It is not, strictly speaking, a national air. It is more of a
languid air, with dark circles around its eyes.

At one place where I had an engagement to change cars, we had a wait of
four hours, and I reclined on a hair-cloth lounge at the hotel, with the
intention of sleeping a part of the time.

Dear, patient reader, did you every try to ride a refractory hair-cloth
lounge all night, bare back? Did you ever get aboard a short,
old-fashioned, black, hair-cloth lounge, with a disposition to buck?

I was told that this was a kind, family lounge that would not shy or
make trouble anywhere, but I had only just closed my dark-red and
mournful eyes in sleep when this lounge gently humped itself, and shed
me as it would its smooth, dark hair in the spring, tra la.

The floor caught me in its great strong arms and I vaulted back upon the
polished bosom of the hair-cloth lounge. It was made for a man about
fifty-three inches in length, and so I had to sleep with my feet in my
pistol pockets and my nose in my bosom up to the second joint.

I got so that I could rise off the floor and climb on the lounge without
waking up. It grew to be second nature to me. I did it just as a man who
is hungry in his sleep bites off large fragments of the air and eats it
involuntarily and smacks his lips and snorts. So I arose and deposited
myself again and again on that old swayback but frolicsome wreck without
waking. But I couldn't get aboard softly enough to avoid waking the
lounge. It would yawn and rumble inside and rise and fall like the deep
rolling sea, till at last I gave up trying to sleep on it any more, and
curled up on the floor.

[Illustration: _I bought ticke