ly cross-examiner: "In this
case I am unfortunate, for there is barely time to say good-by."

There are several reasons why I don't believe in railway station kisses.
Kisses given in public are at best but skimpy little things, suggesting
the swift peck of a robin at a peach, whereas it is truer of kissing
than of many other forms of industry that what is worth doing at all is
worth doing well. Yet I knew that one of these enchantresses expected to
be kissed, and that the other very definitely didn't. Therefore I kissed
them both.

Then I bolted toward the gate.

"Tickets!" demanded the gateman, stopping me.

At last I found them in the inside pocket of my overcoat. I don't know
how they got there. I never carry tickets in that pocket.

As the train began to move I looked at my watch and, discovering it to
be three minutes fast, set it right. That is the sort of train the
Congressional Limited is. A moment later we were roaring through the
blackness of the Hudson River tunnel.

There is something fine in the abruptness of the escape from New York
City by the Pennsylvania Railroad. From the time you enter the station
you are as good as gone. There is no progress between the city's
tenements, with untidy bedding airing in some windows and fat old
slatterns leaning out from others to survey the sordidness and squalor
of the streets below. A swift plunge into darkness, some thundering
moments, and your train glides out upon the wide wastes of the New
Jersey meadows. The city is gone. You are even in another State. Far,
far behind, bathed in glimmering haze which gives them the appearance of
palaces in a mirage, you may see the tops of New York's towering
sky-scrapers, dwarfed yet beautified by distance. Outside the wide car
window the advertising sign-boards pass to the rear in steady parade,
shrieking in strong color of whiskies, tobaccos, pills, chewing gums,
cough drops, flours, hams, hotels, soaps, socks, and shows.

CHAPTER II

A BALTIMORE EVENING

I felt her presence by its spell of might,
Stoop o'er me from above;
The calm, majestic presence of the night,
As of the one I love.

--LONGFELLOW.

Before I went to Baltimore I had but two definite impressions connected
with the place: the first was of a tunnel, filled with coal gas, through
which trains pass beneath the city; the second was that when a
southbound train left Baltimore the time had come to think of cleaning
up,