s sweetheart and go into a Peninsular campaign,
though I did not always know when I was hungry nor discover that I was
thirsting, though I had a worrying ache and inward tremor underlying all
the outward play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple truth
that I did look out of the car-windows with an eye for all that passed,
that I did take cognizance of strange sights and singular people, that
I did act much as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curiosity,
and from time to time even laugh very much as others do who are
attacked with a convulsive sense of the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the
diaphragm.

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars. A communicative
friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one's side during a railroad
journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself
agreeable. "A fast train and a 'slow' neighbor," is my motto. Many
times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an
hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations
into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in
curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni's famous
experiment,--fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do
when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon,--all this without
volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion,
as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them
wound up,--many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to
creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear
detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come
up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my
day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along
my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day
associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and
milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should
have been filling themselves full of fresh juices. My friends spared me
this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness
produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the
exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety
in what we know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened widely, it
pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near
objects contrasted with