w scene for the
third act. The saying is not new, but it comes frequently to the
lips of the one-night stander--It's a great life if you don't
weaken.

THE OWL TRAIN

[Illustration]

Across the cold moonlit landscapes, while good folk are at home curling
their toes in the warm bottom of the bed, the Owl trains rumble with a
gentle drone, neither fast nor slow.

There are several Owl trains with which we have been familiar. One,
rather aristocratic of its kind, is the caravan of sleeping cars that
leaves New York at midnight and deposits hustling business men of the
most aggressive type at the South Station, Boston. After a dissolute
progress full of incredible jerks and jolts these pilgrims reach this
dampest, darkest, and most Arctic of all terminals about the time the
morning codfish begins to warm his bosom on the gridirons of the sacred
city. Another, a terrible nocturnal prowler, slips darkly away from
Albany about 1 A. M., and rambles disconsolately and with shrill
wailings along the West Shore line. Below the grim Palisades of the
Hudson it wakes painful echoes. Its first six units, as far as one can
see in the dark, are blind express cars, containing milk cans and
coffins. We once boarded it at Kingston, and after uneasy slumber across
two facing seats found ourself impaled upon Weehawken three hours later.
There one treads dubiously upon a ferryboat in the fog and brume of
dawn, ungluing eyelids in the bleak dividing pressure of the river
breeze.

But the Owl train we propose to celebrate is the vehicle that departs
modestly from the crypt of the Pennsylvania Station in New York at
half-past midnight and emits blood-shot wanderers at West Philadelphia
at 3:16 in the morning. The railroad company, which thinks these
problems out with nice care, lulls the passengers into unconsciousness
of their woes not only by a gentle and even gait, a progress almost
tender in its carefully modulated repression of speed, but also by
keeping the cars at such an amazing heat that the victims promptly fade
into a swoon. Nowhere will you see a more complete abandonment to the
wild postures of fatigue and despair than in the pathetic sprawl of
these human forms upon the simmering plush settees. A hot eddy of some
varnish-tinctured vapour--certainly not air--rises from under the seats
and wraps the traveller in a nightmarish trance. Occasionally he starts
wildly from his dream and glares frightfully through the misted