gh-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood of
commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally sitting
by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the marble lunch
counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee to
stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are being swept and
garnished. As I passed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I
was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies--five or
six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that
the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was
reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth
book of the Aeneid)--_stant litore puppes_, which I always yearned to
translate "a litter of puppies."

My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit
my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged
from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a
degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was
just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto
the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning.
The day was begun.

THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS

I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) so I do
not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly the
thought comes that I have strayed into the American House of Lords.
Unworthily I sit among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease
mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my peers--those who smoke
cheap tobacco; who nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with
sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane.

But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a limited train
is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is
none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous carnivora. Patently
these men are Lords. In two facing rows, averted from the landscape,
condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual prosperity, they sit in
leather chairs. They curve roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven
to the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they
smoke cigars, those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end
than at the other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear
shoes with fawn-coloured tops.

Is it strange then