one carriage to another. This perpetual slamming
of the fore-door and the aft-door is a
special irritation, particularly when one wants to
get to sleep and is actually wrestling with
Morpheus for his blessing. He appears spectrally at
every station to examine the tickets of the new
comers, and to give them in exchange a check
with a list of stations and distances on the
back, which, in its turn, will be delivered up at
the respective termini. This conductor, when
not chatting with an acquaintance, or imparting
information to inquisitive strangers like myself,
is walking from carriage to carriage, watching
the breaksman, or maintaining the general police
of the line.

The breaksman, sometimes far south, a great
laughing robust negro, who grinds at the brake
as if he were winding up a giant's watch, stands
outside the compartment door, on a small
balcony or platform which joins the two
carriages. On this platform, on its high or
lower steps, men go out to smoke, or
meditatively expectorate, as they watch the half-
cleared forests through which we tear and
scream, scaring the wild turkeys and frightening
the great Kentucky mules in the wooden railed-in
meadows. Yet this "coign of vantage" is
not the smoker's special stand and perch. No,
there is always a smoking car to every train, just
as there is a ladies' car, where no smoking is
allowed.

The smoking car is about as big as a
Kensington omnibus, with seats running all round,
and a table in the middle, on which the newsboy
generally spreads his ephemeral store of
intellectual sophistry: his Superfine Reviews,
his Daily Avalanches, and his Arkansas
"Tobacco Plants." This is, indeed, the den of the
railroad stationer, from whence he emerges to
deliver his " five cent" oracles.

And here a not irrelevant word on the railroad
petty traders, of whom the flying stationer is
now the acknowledged chief. No want can arise
in the traveller's mmd that there is not someone
in an American railway train ready to administer
to. Every town you pass, pelts you with its daily
papers. If you stop for ten minutes at a central
station, a lean expounding sort of quack
missionary, standing erect at the door, informs the
whole" carriageful that "the dead-shot worm
candy" is now selling at twenty-five cents the
packet; that "Vestris's bloom," the finest cos-
metic in the known world, is to be had for half
a dollar the quarter of a pound, and dirt cheap
at the money; or that " Knickerbocker's corn
exterminator" makes life's path easy, at a dime
the ounce packet. Presently, you fall asleep,
and awake covered with a heavy snow of handbills
about Harper's excellent reprints, and
Peterson's vulgar and unscrupulous robberies
from English authors. Anon, shouts a huge
fellow with enormous apples, two cents each,
peaches in their season, hickory nuts,"pecans,"
or maple sugar cakes. To them succeed sellers
of ivory combs, parched corn, packets of mixed
sweetmeats. If the weather be cold, and glazings
of frost lie chill on the crimsoned maple
leaves in the woods, the breaksman enters and
lights the stove that stands in a little circle kept
apart about the centre of the carriage.

I do not, of course, touch on the sanitary
arrangements of the carriages, which are excellent,
or on the refreshment cars, because the
latter are but of recent introduction; but I must
remark on the truly admirable system by which
the conductor, or even the passengers, can, in
cases of fire or murderous assault or other
necessity, at once communicate with the engine-
driver, and instantly stop the train. It consists
of a cord, running in loops along the roof of every
carriage, separating, where separation is necessary,
by hooks and swivels, and attached at one
end to a bell or dial on the engine.

Having now, I trust, given a sketch of the
ordinary American railroad car, sufficient to
enable the reader to understand its general
arrangement, I proceed to the more especial
subject of my chapter— the American sleeping
car— an admirable contrivance, peculiar to the
New World.

Let me leave the Tennessee Railway, on which
the opening of the chapter found me gliding to-
wards the Mississippi, and bear my memory back
to the line that runs from Albany to Buffalo,
and which took me, awestruck even in anticipation,
to the " big thunder water," Niagara.

Landing from the Hudson river steamer, I
find myself, on a certain day after at a certain
town with an Indian name— Schenectady—
bound for Canada. It is about nine o'clock
when I reach the station and go to secure a
sleeping car for the night and to check my
baggage.

The words "checking my baggage" remind
me to make a few remarks on one of the best
institutions in all America, and one which
it will be to our infinite loss if we do not
very soon universally adopt. I am going, say
from Utica to Toledo (what a collocation of
incongruous names), and I have three parcels—
first, my portmanteau, black, with red diamonds
— second, my blue hat-box— third, my wife, to
quote an old and honoured joke of my excellent
grandfather's. Do I direct them carefully on
parchment? No! I arrive at the station and
get my ticket, followed by a muscular negro,
Cuffy by name, who carries my baggage. He
then follows me to the luggage-van, and cries
out:

"Massa George, gib 'un a check for Toledo
for this jebbleman."

Massa George looks up from a chaos of
luggage and answers to him:

"How many?"

"Two, and all going through."

"Two checks for Toledo— right!"

As he speaks, Massa Jack, the under
conductor, selects four brass tickets with leather
loops attached to them, which hang with some
hundreds of others from his arms, and looping
two on my luggage, hands me the two duplicates.

"2359 "— " 2617 " are the figures on my
tickets, and on producing them at Toledo
to-morrow, or to-morrow six months, my black