ed and puzzled. He began to nail on his card,
and I rushed out to the express car, in a good deal of a state of mind,
to ask for an explanation. But no--there was my box, all right, in the
express car; it hadn't been disturbed. [The fact is that without my
suspecting it a prodigious mistake had been made. I was carrying off a
box of guns which that young fellow had come to the station to ship to a
rifle company in Peoria, Illinois, and he had got my corpse!] Just then
the conductor sung out "All aboard," and I jumped into the express car
and got a comfortable seat on a bale of buckets. The expressman was
there, hard at work,--a plain man of fifty, with a simple, honest,
good-natured face, and a breezy, practical heartiness in his general
style. As the train moved off a stranger skipped into the car and set a
package of peculiarly mature and capable Limburger cheese on one end of
my coffin-box--I mean my box of guns. That is to say, I know now that it
was Limburger cheese, but at that time I never had heard of the article
in my life, and of course was wholly ignorant of its character. Well,
we sped through the wild night, the bitter storm raged on, a cheerless
misery stole over me, my heart went down, down, down! The old expressman
made a brisk remark or two about the tempest and the arctic weather,
slammed his sliding doors to, and bolted them, closed his window down
tight, and then went bustling around, here and there and yonder, setting
things to rights, and all the time contentedly humming "Sweet By and
By," in a low tone, and flatting a good deal. Presently I began to
detect a most evil and searching odor stealing about on the frozen air.
This depressed my spirits still more, because of course I attributed
it to my poor departed friend. There was something infinitely saddening
about his calling himself to my remembrance in this dumb pathetic way,
so it was hard to keep the tears back. Moreover, it distressed me on
account of the old expressman, who, I was afraid, might notice it.
However, he went humming tranquilly on, and gave no sign; and for this I
was grateful. Grateful, yes, but still uneasy; and soon I began to feel
more and more uneasy every minute, for every minute that went by that
odor thickened up the more, and got to be more and more gamey and hard
to stand. Presently, having got things arranged to his satisfaction, the
expressman got some wood and made up a tremendous fire in his stove.

This distressed