*

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A SLEEPING-CAR SERENADE.

Not long ago I had to travel by the night-express from Montreal to New
York, and feeling drowsy about eleven o'clock, presented my claim
for a lower berth in the car paradoxically designated "sleeping,"
and tantalizingly named "palace," with sanguine hopes of obtaining
a refreshing snooze. Knowing from experience the aberrations of mind
peculiar to travelers roused from sleep, by which they are impelled to
get off at way-stations, I secured my traps against the contingencies
liable to unchecked baggage, and creeping into the back of the
sepulchral shelf called a bed, I enveloped myself after the fashion of
Indian squaws and Egyptian mummies, and fell asleep.

I do not know whether the noise and concussion of the cars excite the
same sort of dreams in every one's cranium as they do in mine, but
they almost invariably produce in my brain mental phenomena of a
pugnacious character, which are nothing modified by palace cars and
steel rails. This particular night there was a perfect revelry of
dreams in my brain. I was on the frontier with our corps, engaged in
a glorious hand-to-hand conflict with men our equals in number and
valor. We were having the best of it, giving it to them hot and heavy,
crash! through the beggars' skulls, and plunge! into their abominable
abdominal regions. "No quarter!" It was a pity, but it seemed
splendid.

Bang! roared an Armstrong gun, as I thought, close to my ear: down
went a whole column of the enemy like a flash, as I awoke to find it a
dream, alas! and the supposed artillery nothing more or less than one
of those sharp, gurgling snorts produced during inspiration in the
larynx of a stout Jewish gentleman, who had in some mysterious way
got on the outer half of my shelf during my sleep, and whose ancient
descent was clearly defined in the side view I immediately obtained
of the contour and size of his nose. I had got one of my arms out
from under the covering, and found I had "cut left" directly upon the
prominent proboscis of my friend--a passage of arms that materially
accelerated his breathing, and awoke him to the fact that though
he had a nose sufficiently large to have entitled him to Napoleon's
consideration for a generalship had he lived in the days of that
potentate, yet there was something unusual on the end of it, which
was far too large for a pimple and rather heavy for a fly. Perhaps it
induced a nightmare, and d