ing to die!"
cried a woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead body!" And there was
a very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station.
This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.

There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters; in others,
little but silence. In this society, more than any other that ever I was
in, it was the narrator alone who seemed to enjoy the narrative. It was
rarely that any one listened for the listening. If he lent an ear to
another man's story, it was because he was in immediate want of a
hearer for one of his own. Food and the progress of the train were the
subjects most generally treated; many joined to discuss these who
otherwise would hold their tongues. One small knot had no better
occupation than to worm out of me my name; and the more they tried, the
more obstinately fixed I grew to baffle them. They assailed me with
artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence in the future;
but I was perpetually on my guard, and parried their assaults with
inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars for
the secret. He owed me far more, had he understood life, for thus
preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey. I met one of my
fellow-passengers months after, driving a street tramway car in San
Francisco; and, as the joke was now out of season, told him my name
without subterfuge. You never saw a man more chap-fallen. But had my
name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he had still been
disappointed.

There were no emigrants direct from Europe--save one German family and a
knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves, one reading the
New Testament all day long through steel spectacles, the rest discussing
privately the secrets of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester
Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish; for my
part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and
more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family
apart from neighbouring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more
foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel--that some of
the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.

The rest were all American born, but they came from almost every quarter
of that Continent. All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive
to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New
York, from far wester