great deal of noise, a
great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a
shriek and a bell. The cars are like shabby omnibuses
holding thirty, forty, fifty people. In the centre of the
carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or
anthracite coal, which is for the most part red hot. It is
insufferably close, and you see the hot air fluttering
between yourself and any other object you may happen to look
at."

There could have been but little improvement in our railroads in 1872
when Rubinstein came to America, for although he accepted $40,000 for
215 concerts during his first trip, he refused an offer of $125,000 for
only 50 concerts when a manager tried to persuade him to return.

American railroads now present the acme of comfort, convenience, and
even luxury in travel, yet the European artist has difficulty in
adjusting himself to journeys of thousands of miles crowded in a short
winter season when he has been accustomed to little trips of a few
hundred kilometers. He comes to dread the trains as we might a prison
van. Paderewski resorts to a private car, but even this luxurious mode
of travel may be very monotonous and exhausting.

The great distances must certainly account for some of the evidences of
strain which deform the faces and exhaust the minds of so many
virtuosos. The traveling salesman seems to thrive upon miles of railroad
travel as do the crews of the trains, but the virtuoso, dragged from
concert to concert by his showman, grows tired--oh, so tired, pale, wan,
listless and indifferent! At the beginning of the season he is quite
another person. The magnetism that has done so much to win him fame
shines in his eyes and seems to emanate from his finger-tips, but the
difference in his physical being at the end of the season is sickening.
Like a bedraggled, worn-out circus coming in from the wear and tear of a
hard season, he crawls wearily back to New York with a cinematographic
recollection of countless telegraph poles flying past the windows,
audience after audience, sleeping cars, budding geniuses, the inevitable
receptions with their equally inevitable chicken salad or lukewarm
oysters, and the "sweet young things," who, like Heine's mythical tribe
of _Asra_, must love or perish. Some virtuosos have the physical
strength to endure all this, even enjoy it, but many have confessed to
me that their American tours have been literal nightmares.