icket, it will buy you a berth in a small pen which you
must share with another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night
long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second-class passengers in
France or Italy cannot buy a berth in a sleeper for any money, and they
may go hang or stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company
cares; and this suggests the question whether in our own free and equal
land the passengers in the ordinary day coaches are ever invited, by the
first call or the last, to share the hospitalities of our dining-cars;
or are these restricted to the proud stomachs of the Pullman passengers?

No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but for
decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third
the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and
muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried sleepers
behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to
round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow
gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy; but
so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you
could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it
privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money
cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars
to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be
disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe; even
second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in
Germany, and in Italy--poor, dear Italy!--they are worse still. That is
because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or
because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have
dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth, which must bear
the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we will
not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel is as bad
as heart could wish--the heart that loves Italy and holds dear the
memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one
still went by diligence or _vettura_. The only absolutely _good_
railroad travel is in England, where the corridor car imagined from the
Pullman has realized the most exacting ideal of the traveller of any
class. In the matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having attained
perfection at a