nds. Whoa--look out!! That's the fourth time that chap's tried to tag
me with his automobile baggage truck. He'll get me yet. I wish I were a
trunk, Jim. Why aren't they as kind to the poor traveler as they are to
his trunk? I don't see any electric truck here to haul me the rest of
the way into New York. It's a long, long walk to the front door of this
station, and my feet hurt.

That's the idea. Let the porter lug that suit case. I'd have hired one
myself, but I was afraid I couldn't support him in the style you fellows
have made him accustomed to. It was mighty nice of you to come down and
meet me, Jim. I've been standing here for five minutes in this infernal
mass meeting of locomotives, trying to keep out from underfoot, and
getting myself all calm and collected before I surged out of this
howling forty-acre depot and looked New York in the eye. It's nothing
but a plain case of rattles. I have 'em whenever I land here, Jim. Dump
me out on Broadway and I wouldn't care, but whenever I land back in the
bowels of a Union Station I'm a meek little country cousin, and I always
want some one to come along and take me by the hand.

It's the fault of your depots. They're the biggest things you have, and
it isn't fair for you to come at me with your biggest things first.
Every time I start for New York I swear to myself that I'm going to go
into a fifty thousand dollar dining-room full of waiters far above my
station, and tuck my napkin in my collar, just to show I'm a free-born
citizen; and I'm going to trust my life to crossing policemen, and go by
forty-story buildings without even flipping an eye up the corner and
counting the stories by threes. I'm mighty sophisticated until I hit the
city and get out into a depot which has a town square under roof and a
waiting-room so high that they have to shut the front door to keep the
thunder storms out. Then I begin to shrink. And by the time I've walked
from Yonkers or thereabouts, clean through the station and out of a
two-block hallway, with more stores on either side than there are in all
Homeburg, and have committed my soul to the nearest taxicab pirate, I
feel like a cheese mite in the great hall of Karnak.

No, sir; when I get into a big city depot, I'm a country Jake, and I
need a compass and kind words. I've suffered a lot from those depots. I
missed a train in Washington once because I figured it would take me
only ten minutes to go from my hotel to the train. But I co