and maidens, some of them in little more than nightgear, some
with stable lanterns, and all offering beds for sale. Their charge began
with twenty-five cents a cushion, but fell, before the train went on
again, to fifteen, with the bed-board gratis, or less than one-fifth of
what I had paid for mine at the Transfer. This is my contribution to the
economy of future emigrants.

A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books
(such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant
journeys, soap, towels, tin washing-dishes, tin coffee-pitchers, coffee,
tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early
next morning the newsboy went round the cars, and chumming on a more
extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a
copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried
on most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little
after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname
on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of
a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or
smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I have never seen
tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used
these instruments, one after another, according to the order of their
first awaking; and when the firm had finished there was no want of
borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the
stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the
car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the
woodwork, or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to
wash his face and neck and hands,--a cold, an insufficient, and, if the
train is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the
cars. Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning; at the
first station the natives would come on board with milk and eggs and
coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would