unted only
the distance to the front door of the Union Station. By the time I'd
journeyed on through the fool thing, my train had gone. Once I missed a
train in the Boston station because I didn't know which one of the
thirty tracks my train was on. I guessed it was somewhere to the right,
and I guessed wrong. It was twenty-four tracks away to the left, and I
couldn't get back in time. So I went into their waiting-room, which is
as big as a New England cornfield and has all the benches named for
various towns. I had to stand up two hours because I couldn't find the
Homeburg bench.

I'm an admirer of big cities, Jim, and I wouldn't have you take a foot
off your Woolworth building, or a single crashity!! bang!! out of your
subways, but I wish there was a little more coziness in your depots.
Why, at Homeburg I'm nearer the train at my house than I am in New York
after I've got to the station. It's great to have a depot so big that it
takes the place of mountain scenery, but it's hard on the poor traveler,
even if it does have all the comforts of away-from-home in it. And then
it swallows up things so. It takes away all the pleasure of having a
railroad in the town. I suppose five hundred trains come into this
station every day, but they're just trains--nothing more. You don't get
any fun or information or excitement out of them. You can't even chase
them--they bang a gate in your face when you try. I'll bet you don't get
as much comfort and fun out of all these five hundred trains, Jim, as we
do out of the 4:11 train at Homeburg.

No; it's not any better than your trains. It's not as good. You can't
get raw oysters and magazines and individual cocktails and shaves on it.
All you can get is cinders and peanuts, and I would advise you, if you
were hungry, to eat the former and put the latter in your eye. It's the
kind of a train you New Yorkers would ride on and then write home
telling about the horrors of travel in the great West. But it means
everything to Homeburg. It means a lot more than the half dozen limited
trains which roar through our town fifty miles an hour every day and
have made us so expert at dodging that we will develop kangaroo legs in
another generation. It's our train. Here in New York a hundred trains
come in each morning from Chicago, New Orleans, Everywhere and points
beyond, and the office-boy next door to the depot doesn't stop licking
stamps long enough to look up. But when old Number Eleven, which