? Can you name as many yourself?"

"Certainly not. Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time, and
nobody will remember the poems of the four years ending the present
decade."

"Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering?"

The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, with the air of a
cross-examined witness, "Under advice of counsel, I decline to answer."

XV

COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL

On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a friend of the Easy
Chair (so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy) was walking
wearily up and down in the station at Portland, Maine, and wondering if
the time for his train to start would ever come, and, if the time did
come, whether his train would really take advantage of that opportunity
to leave Portland. It was, of course, a night train, and of course he
had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car; there are certain things
that come by nature with the comfortable classes to which the friend of
the Easy Chair belonged. He would no more have thought of travelling in
one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in the station than he would
have thought of going by stage, as he could remember doing in his
boyhood. He stopped beside the cars and considered their potential
passengers with amaze and compassion; he laughed at the notion of his
being himself one of them; and, when he turned his back on them, he was
arrested by the sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the
platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor-car which, for
reasons of its own, was waiting in luminous detachment apart from the
day coaches. There was something engaging in the gentle humility of the
elderly pair who peered into the long, brilliant saloon with an effect
not so much of ignorance as of inexperience. They were apparently not so
rustic as they were what another friend of the Easy Chair calls
villaginous; and they seemed not of the commonest uninformed
villaginosity, but of general intelligence such as comes of reading and
thinking of many modern things which one has never seen. As the
eavesdropper presently made out from a colloquy unrestrained by
consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car before, except
perhaps as it flashed by their meek little home depot with the rest of
some express train that never stopped there.

"It _is_ splendid, John," the woman said, holding by the man's arm while
she leaned forward to t