only."

"Here's luck, Potty! may ---- ---- me, but I'm glad I met yer, Grimes,"
remarked my profane friend, taking a long pull at the bottle I handed
him in my gratitude. "Here's to your wife, Grimes!" and the cars
starting just then, "deer bil" took another pull and, with great
absence of mind, put the bottle in his pocket and waved us adieu.

The Mail car, like the Express, was a box ten feet by six--one-half the
space filled with counter and pigeon-holes, and the other half with
mail-bags. Into the remainder were crammed the agent--specific gravity
equal to that of two hundred and ninety pounds of feathers--a friend of
his and myself. The friend I soon found was what is known as "a good
traveling companion;" _i.e._, a man who keeps himself primed with broad
stories and bad whisky, and who doesn't object to a song in which the
air always runs away with the harmony. After we started I tried to
sleep. It was no use. Lying on one mail-bag with another for a pillow,
that is liable to be jerked out at any station to the near dislocation
of your neck, with a funny man sitting nearly on you, are not sedatives.
My bottle was gone, so I drank gin out of the funny man's. I hate
gin--but that night I hated everything and tried the _similia similibus_
rule.

We missed connection at Weldon. Did anybody ever make connection there?
We were four hours late, and with much reason had, therefore, to wait
five hours more. If Kingsville is cheap and nasty, Weldon is dear and
nastier. Such a supper! It was inedible even to a man who had tasted
nothing but whisky, gin and peanuts for forty-eight hours. Then the
landlord--whose hospitality was only equaled by his patriotism--refused
to open his house at train time. We must either stay all night, or not
at all--for the house would shut at ten o'clock--just after supper. So
a deputation of the Crescents and I waited on him, and after a plain
talk concluded to "cuss and quit." So we clambered into some platform
cars that were to go with the train, and, after a sumptuous supper of
dried-apple pies and peanuts, slept the sleep of the weary.

CHAPTER XI.

"ON TO RICHMOND!"

Of course, Petersburg was reached two hours after the train for
Richmond had left, but in full time to get half a cold breakfast, at
double price. For, about the first development one noted in the South
was the growth of an inordinate greed in the class who had anything to
sell, or to do, that was supposed to be