ME. Pooh, pooh!" delivered in that
rhythmical fashion which all meditation assumes on a railway train.
Exempli gratia: One night, having raised my window-curtain to look
over a moonlit snowy landscape, as I pulled it down the lines of a
popular comic song flashed across me. Fatal error! The train
instantly took it up, and during the rest of the night I was haunted by
this awful refrain: "Pull down the bel-lind, pull down the bel-lind;
simebody's klink klink, O don't be shoo-shoo!" Naturally this differs
on the different railways. On the New York Central, where the road-bed
is quite perfect and the steel rails continuous, I have heard this
irreverent train give the words of a certain popular revival hymn after
this fashion: "Hold the fort, for I am Sankey; Moody slingers still.
Wave the swish swash back from klinky, klinky klanky kill." On the New
York and New Haven, where there are many switches, and the engine
whistles at every cross road, I have often heard, "Tommy make room for
your whooopy! that's a little clang; bumpity, bumpity, boopy, clikitty,
clikitty, clang." Poetry, I fear, fared little better. One starlit
night, coming from Quebec, as we slipped by a virgin forest, the
opening lines of Evangeline flashed upon me. But all I could make of
them was this: "This is the forest primeval-eval; the groves of the
pines and the hemlocks-locks-locks-locks-loooock!" The train was only
"slowing" or "braking" up at a station. Hence the jar in the metre.

I had noticed a peculiar Aeolian harp-like cry that ran through the
whole train as we settled to rest at last after a long run--an almost
sigh of infinite relief, a musical sigh that began in C and ran
gradually up to F natural, which I think most observant travelers have
noticed day and night. No railway official has ever given me a
satisfactory explanation of it. As the car, in a rapid run, is always
slightly projected forward of its trucks, a practical friend once
suggested to me that it was the gradual settling back of the car body
to a state of inertia, which, of course, every poetical traveler would
reject. Four o'clock the sound of boot-blacking by the porter faintly
apparent from the toilet-room. Why not talk to him? But, fortunately,
I remembered that any attempt at extended conversation with conductor
or porter was always resented by them as implied disloyalty to the
company they represented. I recalled that once I had endeavored to
impress upon