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We shall forget the misery of these patient voices which visit us with their prayer for subsistence every day. I think some of the best talks I have had in my life have been with chance companions on whom I have happened in the course of a roving life sometimes in a restaurant, sometimes in the railroad-car or steamboat, and not unfrequently in the smoking-room of a hotel.

Neither are we in any way stirred by such information as, that he, like an English lord of whom he tells, was accustomed to eat oysters every night in New York; or that he "was pervaded, permeated, steeped, and bathed in a longing desire to behold Niagara," and that, when he beheld it, his "feelings were not so much those of astonishment as of an overpowering sense of Law"; or that a peddler in a railroad-car sold nine bottles of quack medicine at a dollar a bottle; or that he had eight pages of interview with a Baltimore madman, who proved his insanity by perpetually calling Mr.

"This consumption of ministers," wrote Irving to Mr. Webster, "is appalling. To carry on a negotiation with such transient functionaries is like bargaining at the window of a railroad-car: before you can get a reply to a proposition the other party is out of sight." Apart from politics, Irving's residence was full of half-melancholy recollections and associations.

In fact, you must all have noticed, my dear readers, that there are some sorts of people for whom everybody turns out as they would for a railroad-car, without stopping to ask why, and Candace was one of them. Moreover, Mr.

He would have been confirmed in his opinion had he observed the glance of hatred with which the detected thief followed his young ward. At the isthmus they exchanged steamers, crossing the narrow neck of land on the backs of mules. To-day the journey is more rapidly and comfortably made in a railroad-car. Of the voyage on the Pacific nothing need be said.

I suppose the reader has some notion of an American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box, like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a stove and a convenience, one at either end, a passage down the middle, and transverse benches upon either hand.

I think no New England summer is quite perfect unless you stay at least a day in the White Mountains. "Staying in the White Mountains" does not mean climbing on top of a stage-coach at Centre Harbor, and riding by day and by night for forty-eight hours till you fling yourself into a railroad-car at Littleton, and cry out that "you have done them." No.

The railroad-car is hauled alongside, and with other bushels of its kind the grain is transported to a giant flour-mill, where it is turned into a whitened, pulverized product, packed in barrels, and shipped across the ocean to a foreign port.

The same penalty was prescribed for any person of color "who shall intrude himself into any religious or other public assembly of white persons, or into any railroad-car or other vehicle set apart for the accommodation of white persons," and with a mock show of impartiality it was provided that a white man intruding himself into an assembly of negroes, or into a negro-car, might be subjected to a like punishment.

And will not the adventurous pleasure-tourist, who has been jarred, jammed, roasted, coddled, and suffocated in a railroad-car for a whole night, with two days to sandwich it, on being deposited in an airy stateroom for the last two hundred miles of his journey, think the man who invented the steamboat deserving of a "first-rate" life?