the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt of the
ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant shudder and a quick
lateral motion. The air within the cars was deadly; if a window was
raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew in and quick gusts caught away
the breath. So they sat with closed windows, sweltering and stifling,
and all the faces on which a lively horror was not painted were dull and
damp with apathetic misery.

The incidents were in harmony with the abject physical tone of the
company. There was a quarrel between a thin, shrill-voiced, highly
dressed, much-bedizened Jewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy old
woman, half asleep, and a boy with large pink transparent ears that
stood out from his head like the handles of a jar, on the other side,
about a seat which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept
filled with packages on the pretense that it was engaged. It was a loud
and fierce quarrel enough, but it won no sort of favor; and when the
Jewess had given a final opinion that the greedy old woman was no
lady, and the boy, who disputed in an ironical temper, replied, "Highly
complimentary, I must say," there was no sign of relief or other
acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that there had been a quarrel.

There was a little more interest taken in the misfortune of an old
purblind German and his son, who were found by the conductor to be a few
hundred miles out of the direct course to their destination, and were
with some trouble and the aid of an Americanized fellow-countryman made
aware of the fact. The old man then fell back in the prevailing apathy,
and the child naturally cared nothing. By and by came the unsparing
train-boy on his rounds, bestrewing the passengers successively with
papers, magazines, fine-cut tobacco, and packages of candy. He gave the
old man a package of candy, and passed on. The German took it as the
bounty of the American people, oddly manifested in a situation where he
could otherwise have had little proof of their care. He opened it
and was sharing it with his son when the train-boy came back, and
metallically, like a part of the machinery, demanded, "Ten cents!" The
German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated, "Ten cents! ten cents!"
with tiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled. When it had
passed through the alien's head that he was to pay for this national
gift and he took with his tremulous fingers from the recesses of his
pocket-book a