When a man travels, what material baggage he takes is immaterial, but he leaves behind him a great deal of mental and moral impedimenta. There used to be a saying among the traders to Santa FÉ, "If there is any dog in a man he will show it out on the trail." During the war, people going to the front were astonished to learn what manner of people some of their nearest neighbors really were. It is so in the world on wheels. Men and women show out wonderfully. But whatever you put on to go a-journeying, even to that new silk hat, if you must, never put on airs. They are altogether too gauzy to be warm in winter, or decent in summer. Many a woman has told you, without intending it, that the entertainment she regarded with such measureless contempt is better than anything she ever encountered at home. Clothes have become transparent as window-glass. They utterly fail as a disguise.

You grow conscious on a railway train, as nowhere else, what trifles go to make up the warp and woof of life. Thus, you catch yourself watching an old-fashioned man with an ancient hat that was beaver in its time. He takes it off and holds it in his hand. You wonder how it has come to look so like its owner. It has a character, and the character is the man's. Then the heavy roll of his coat-collar, with a padded look, reminds you of the picture of George the First, the Last, and the All-the-Time, to-wit: George Washington. You think G. W.'s face is much like a tin lantern with no holes in it to let out the light, and about as—is it profanity, or what is it?—about as stupid a face as there is going. To be sure, it has a solid look, and so has a round of beef.

You look up just then, and, yonder in the corner facing you, sits a man of sixty, frosty, Octoberish, square face, double chin, hair long and curly, pleasant eyes, all surmounted by a broad-brimmed hat. You start at the resemblance; it is as much like Benjamin Franklin, printer, as one picture is like another.

Then you wonder what that lady over across the aisle is trying to get out of that bottle with a knitting-needle. You watch, and she spears away until she brings out a little pickle. You notice a couple whispering and giggling, and making objects of themselves generally, and you marvel why, when young married people travel in the cars by sunlight, they don't let the honeymoon set, or change, or something.

The train stops at a station among the pines—you are on a Wisconsin road—and little girls come to your window with small clusters of wintergreen berries, set off with a few glossy leaves. You buy a fresh woodsy taste of spring, and then follow the girls away to their humble homes among the sand-hills, and fancy how they live and what they hope.

The train halts at a station in Maryland—you are on the train from Washington to New York—and dusky boys and maidens, born on the shady side of humanity, swarm around with neat little paper-boxes, with a layer of fried oysters looking as light and frisky as your grandmother's fritters. The ivory smiles are very pleasant to see, and before you know it you are humming "Way down in Alabama," and sorrowing that some of the sweetest melodies in the world since the daughters of Judah hung their harps on the willows, should have dropped out of fashion like lead down a shot-tower, and wondering what poet, what historian, will yet preserve the legends and songs of the days of the Old Plantation. Then you wander away to Holy Land, and consider what punishment should be meted out to the man who has just been telling us—and wants to be thanked for it!—that the trees those Jewish Girls hung their harps on—those sweet-voiced girls, with the blue-black hair—were not willows at all, but poplars! Old-fashioned people call them "popples." Fancy a singer hanging her harp on a popple! Then, there is now and then a lady who has a sort of petroleum-fortune refinement, who speaks of a poplar-tree as a "popular," much as if she should fancy that engineer is a sort of corruption of indianeer. All these things are dreadful, but a popple-hung harp is worse.

The train pulls up at a station in Virginia, and a barefoot girl approaches you with flowers to sell—fragrant Magnolias, and the most graceful and grateful offering of all, and you fall to thinking if anything so beautiful will ever be named after you, as this magnolia was, after that Professor Magnol. Happy Magnol! The flowers should grace his tablet in the fairest of white marble. Now you pass through the apple region of New York, and the chestnut woods of Ohio. You know both, by the swarms of small Buckeyes bearing chestnuts, and the bits of Excelsiors loaded with Greenings and Baldwins.

Then you fall to watching the man with the new silk hat. Every body does. It is not an irritated hat, for it shines like a bottle. He bought it yesterday, and is going a thousand miles immediately. The head seems to have been made just to have some handy place to put the hat. That hat thus put comes into the car. Its support is seated, carefully applies a thumb and finger to both sides of the brim, and lifts it perpendicularly off, much as if his ears ran up into the top of it, and he would lift it away without touching their tips. He looks at it. It caught a little bump as he entered the car, and there is the mark. He smooths it with a finger in a sorrowful way, reaches up, and puts it in the rack crown down. Then he settles to the journey, thinks again, elongates, and puts that hat brim down. This satisfies him.

In a few minutes he rises, gives that castor another turn, as if it were a kaleidoscope and he bound to have one peep more, and deposits it upon its side. At the instant he is about to let go of it the car gives a frolicsome lurch, and that hat catches a jam. He withdraws it tenderly, and there is the scar. It looks like the kick of a vicious horse, but it is the work of an ass to wear such a thing on a journey. What sort of a figure would Moses have cut with a silk hat, in the last years—say the thirty-eighth of them—of his Wilderness wanderings? Well, the man whips out his handkerchief, and allays the irritation of the angry hat. He applies his tongue to it as if for some healing quality, claps it upon his head, and, wearied with physical exertion and mental anxiety, falls asleep. He is not Jupiter, but he resembles him, for he "nods," and that unhappy tile tumbles, strikes the back of the seat with the thrum of a feeble tambourine, and bounds sepulchrally along the floor. A man puts his foot upon it in his haste to be neighborly, and "when the man with it" recovers the unlucky bit of head-gear, it looks like a short-joint of stove pipe that somebody has wildly hammered and wickedly sworn at because it would neither go inside nor outside. But the man with the new silk hat never falters. He carries a head to put the hat on. He carries a hat-box to put the hat in. He makes a right angle of himself, and sets his hat right side down upon his lap, as if about to play an endless game of "pin." You saw him yesterday. There is "an eternal fitness in things," even in hats.

They used to tell—in old times more than now—of "presenting the freedom" of this and that, London or Amsterdam, or what not, to somebody "in a gold box." That is not the ceremony in later days. They present you "the freedom" of the world on wheels, if you can pay for the ticket. On a California-bound train you met a lady. Not to indulge in any pleasant euphemism, she was a half century old, but then she was strong and womanly, and apparently no nearer death than when she was handed about in long-clothes. She was the mother of men. She was the wife of an English physician and botanist; I should say "scientist," but if there is a mean word in the language, it is that same "scientist." It reminds me of nothing but a thin, offensive bug, that has been subjected to the pressure of a vindictive thumb-nail. She was unattended. She had a ticket that shut over and over like a Japanese book. It was good from London to—New Zealand! Across two oceans, Atlantic and Pacific; across the American continent. She was bound home. She ate strawberries, she said, with her husband and "the boys," just before she left New Zealand. She ate strawberries with her sister at the parting meal in London; and, as she smilingly added, "I shall be in time for strawberries and cream at San Francisco."

No more nervous anxiety about the lady borne on wheels around the globe, than if she had been walking under the palms in her Australasian home. You could not help thinking, as you regarded her pleasant face, of the Malay of the old Geography dressed in a towel, amidst a far-away and inaccessible scene of tropic luxuriance, only to be found after months of tossing by sea and perils by land, of cannibals and beasts of prey; and here she was, going directly there to her charming English home in the South Pacific seas, with that crown-jewel of the firmament, the Southern Cross, in sight. How pitifully shriveled, like a last year's filbert, is Tom Moore's little song about the Irish Norah, who went on foot and alone around the Emerald Isle unharmed—

beside the tremendous arc of circumnavigation the Doctor's wife was describing without a flutter!

So all these trifles beguile the way, keep the mental watch from running down in your pocket, until the brakeman earns his supper by telling you where you can earn yours, as he shouts through the car, "Twenty minutes for supper!"