He succumbed, but he met his fate bravely and with the
colors of his wit flying. The circumstances are these:--

There is a certain railway thoroughfare which justly prides itself
upon the beauty of its scenery. This road passes through a
hill-country, and what it gains in the picturesque it loses in that
rectilinear directness most grateful to the traveler with a sensitive
stomach. The Bibliotaph often patronized this thoroughfare, and one
day it made him sick. As the train swept around a sharp curve, he
announced his earliest symptom by saying: 'The conspicuous advantages
of this road are that one gets views of the scenery and reviews of his
meals.'

A few minutes later he suggested that the road would do well to change
its name, and hereafter be known as 'The Emetic G. and O.'

They who were with him proffered sympathy, but he refused to be
pitied. He thought he had a remedy. He discovered that by taking as
nearly as possible a reclining posture, he got temporary relief. He
kept settling more and more till at last he was nearly on his back.
Then he said: 'If it be true that the lower down we get the more
comfortable we are, the basements of Hell will have their
compensations.'

He was too ill to say much after this, but his last word, before the
final and complete extinction of his manhood, was, 'The influence of
this road is such that employees have been known involuntarily to
throw up their jobs.'

The Bibliotaph invariably excited comment and attention when he was
upon his travels. I do not think he altogether liked it. Perhaps he
neither liked it nor disliked it. He accepted the fact that he was not
as other men quite as he would have accepted any indisputable fact. He
used occasionally to express annoyance because of the discrepancy
between his reputation and appearance; in other words, because he
seemed a man of greater fame than he was. He suffered the petty
discomforts of being a personage, and enjoyed none of the advantages.
He declared that he was quite willing to be much more distinguished or
much less conspicuous. What he objected to was the Laodicean character
of his reputation as set over against the pronounced and even
startling character of his looks and manner.

He used also to note with amusement how indelible a mark certain early
ambitions and tentative studies had made upon him. People invariably
took him for a clergyman. They decided this at once and conducted
themselves accordingly. He