ople were not
allowed to ship nitro-glycerine or dynamite legitimately, they'd smuggle
it through their baggage. This assertion was contradicted emphatically,
and the passenger was laughed at, flouted, and ignominiously put to
scorn. Rising up in his wrath, he produced a capacious valise from under
the seat, and, slapping it emphatically on the cover, said, "Oh, you
think they don't, eh? Don't carry explosives in cars? What's this?" and
he gave the valise a resounding thump, "Thar's two hundred good dynamite
cartridges in that air valise; sixty pounds of deadly material; enough to
blow this yar train and the whole township from Cook County to
Chimborazo. Thar's dynamite enough," he continued; but he was without an
auditor, for the passengers had fled incontinently, and he could have sat
down upon twenty-two seats if he had wanted to. And the respectful way
in which the baggage men on the out-going trains in the evening handled
the trunks and valises was pleasant to see.

The neglect of carefulness appears, in one instance at least, to have
involved inconvenience to the offending official. "An unknown genius,"
says an American periodical, "the other day entrusted a trunk, with a
hive of bees in it, to the tender mercies of a Syracuse
'baggage-smasher.' The company will pay for the bees, and the doctor
thinks his patient will be round in a fortnight or so."

--Williams's _Our Iron Roads_.

STUMPED.

Several Sundays ago a Philadelphia gentleman took his little son on a
railway excursion. The little fellow was looking out of the window, when
his father slipped the hat off the boy's head. The latter was much
grieved at his supposed loss, when papa consoled him by saying that he
would "whistle it back." A little later he whistled and the hat
reappeared. Not long after the little lad flung his hat out of the
window, shouting, "Now, papa, whistle it back again!" A roar of laughter
in the car served to enhance the confusion of perplexed papa. Moral:
Don't attempt to deceive little boys with plausible stories.

EXCURSIONISTS PUT TO THE PROOF.

A good story is told of the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincoln Railway
Company. A week or two since, the company ran an excursion train to
London and back, the excursion being intended for their workmen at Gorton
and Manchester. There was an enormous demand for the tickets; so
enormous that the officials began