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whether a Pullman train would be such a great advance or advantage over
the old-fashioned European first-class carriages in which he had been so
long content to travel with the native nobility. Self-brought to book on
this point, he had to own that he had once had moments of thinking in a
German second-class car that he would not change to an American Pullman
if he could for even less than a third more money. He recalled a
pleasant run from Crewe to Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when
he never once thought of a Pullman car except to think it was no better.
To be sure, this was after two-thirds of his third-class
fellow-passengers had got out, and he was left to the sole enjoyment of
two-thirds of the seats. It is the luxury of space which your more money
buys you in England, where no one much lower than a duke or a prime
minister now goes first class for a long haul. For short hauls it is
different, and on the Continent it is altogether different. There you
are often uncomfortably crowded in the first-class carriages, and
doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any, so that if you are
wise, or only well informed, you will give the guard a shilling to
telegraph before leaving London and get you a number on the Rapide from
Calais to Paris.

It is astonishing how quickly knowledge of any such advisable precaution
spreads among even such arrogantly stupid people as first-class
passengers ordinarily are. By the time a certain train had started for
Dover with that friend of the Easy Chair's already mentioned, every soul
in his first-class compartment had telegraphed ahead, and when they
arrived in Calais the earliest Englishman who got past the customs ran
ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with his hand-baggage, so
that the latest Frenchman was obliged to jump up and down and scream,
and perhaps swear in his strange tongue, before he could find room for
his valise, and then calm down and show himself the sweetest and
civilest of men, and especially the obedient humble servant of the
Englishman who had now made a merit of making way for his bag.

At this point the fable teaches that money will not buy everything in
European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not,
for instance, buy comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in a
French sleeper between Paris and Marseilles either way. For an
augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine dollars, on the price of a
first-class t