shot
sharp glances at our human frame.

One look was enough to show that we had opened the wrong curtains. Every
second we expected that a female scream would split the air wide
open, that the passengers would tumble out of the berths, and that the
conductor would have us arrested for coalition with intent to deceive.
It seemed years that we sat there with that cold hand grasping the
situation, and we would have given half our fortune to have been in the
bunk just one remove towards Canada.

All things have an end, and just as we were imagining that the woman
with the hare lip was feeling around with her disengaged hand to draw
from its concealment in her corset, a carving knife, with which to cut
a couple of slices off our liver, a voice said, "Well, what in Kalamazoo
are you doing in this berth, anyway?"

The porter came along with a lantern, and we looked at the woman with a
hare lip and a bass voice, and it was not a woman at all, but a Detroit
drummer for a stove house. Finding that we were not a midnight assassin,
nor a woman, the drummer let go of the small of our back, and we got
into our own berth; but it was a narrow escape; the woman with the hare
lip was in the upper berth. We found that out in the morning when she
talked through her nose at the porter about fetching a step ladder for
her to climb down on.

PARALYSIS IN A THEATRE

Inasmuch as there seems to be no other business before the house, we
desire, Mr. Speaker, to arise to a personal explanation. There was
something occurred at the Opera House, the last night that the Rice
Surprise Party played "Revels," that placed us in a wrong position
before the public.

Mr. Gunning, the scene painter, had prided himself that the
transformation scene that he had fixed up for the play was about as nice
as could be, and as we confessed that we had only got an imperfect view
of it, the night before, from one side of the house, he insisted that
we take a seat right in front of the stage, in the parquette, and get a
good view of it.

There were a good many legs in the show, and we didn't want to sit right
down in front all the evening, so we compromised the matter by
agreeing to sit in the dress circle until it was about time for the
transformation scene, and then, after the giddy girls had all been
behind the scenes, we would go down and take a front seat, right back of
the orchestra, and take in the transformation scene.

Well, they had got through