When the necromancer turns farmer, sows a few kernels of wheat in a little tin-box of earth, claps on the cover, sends a few sparks of electricity through it, whips off the lid and shows you the green blades an inch and a half long, in a minute and a half, it is a phenomenon, but not a miracle. You can see something quite as marvelous in the World on Wheels any day. Enter a well-filled car in "the wee small hours ayont the twal." The light is dim but not religious with the uncertain glimmer of candles or the smoky flare of kerosene, which ought to be banished from every civilized and Christian road. The seats are heaped with shapeless piles of clothes. Folks are shut up like jack-knives or bagged like game. Here and there a head is visible, swaying about when there isn't any wind, as if everything had "lodged" except a bearded stalk now and then. By-and-by the gray, cold, unspeculative dawn begins to show at the East windows, and there is a stir among the bundles. A man with hair over his front like a Shetland pony's mane emerges from a blanket. A boy with the head of a distaff changes ends. A girl blossoms out in the next seat.

But there is one large heap of clothes that you watch, and they are good ones. A dainty hat with a feather in it swings from the rack above by one string. A muff like a well-to-do cat reposes in the wire manger. The bundle appears to be composed of cloaks, shawls, and a lap-robe. It is shaped like an egg, and it is an egg. First one shawl gives a little lift, then another. There is a slight surge of a cloak. Off goes a shawl. A snug gaiter with a foot in it emerges at one end, and a disheveled head at the other. Forth comes a hand, and at last the chrysalis is rent, and the occupant is hatched out before your eyes. But it is anything but a butterfly. It is a crumpled, drowsy piece of womanhood, who slept in her head but not in her hair.

The trying, pitiless light of early morning plays upon her terrifically, and she knows it. It amuses you to watch her under your eyelids. She brings forth from her reticule a liver-shaped device, and she hangs it on behind, like the fender of a canal-boat, just over her combativeness and philo-progenitiveness, and what not. Then she arranges and sorts out curls and ringlets for different organs. You ought to see that head. It grows like a soap-bubble. She claps a love of a friz on her self-esteem, which allies her to angels; a coil of curl upon her firmness, which brings her, sometimes, within neighborly distance of donkeys; she borders her brow with ringlets, trails a braid about her inhabitiveness and constructiveness, touches up the tress on her veneration, and the head is artistically complete. She washes her face with a handkerchief, rights her collar, shakes out the creases, tosses the little hat upon the top of all things, and is ready for breakfast. Who talks of necromantic wheat, when here is a human flower hatched from an awkward bundle in less than thirty minutes!

When you take a train with a harem in it—I use the word in its originally clean sense—and you have no personal interest in the harem, you are apt to fare badly. The train is meant where the women are sorted out for one car, and what is left is just turned into another. It is a vicious fashion, and fosters the art of lying. There goes a young man at the heels of a lady whom he never saw before, or spoke to in his life, and he is carrying a spick-and-span new bandbox. My word for it, it is as empty as a church contribution-box on Saturday afternoon. He bought that box for precisely that emergency. The lady ascends the platform. So does the bandbox. The brakeman opens the door, and the young man slips in unquestioned, and secures a comfortable seat. He means to study for the ministry, and he has been lying by bandbox!

There is another man. He appears to be a good man. You are sure he is, and he stands where the brakeman can see him, and touches his hat to a window of the harem where nobody is sitting, and then, with a little smiling affectionate haste, he skips up the steps and says, "Please let me in a minute!" and in he goes. That unfortunate man never beheld a face in that car in all his life. The more you think of it the more vicious the fashion seems. It does not benefit the ribbons, and is a positive damage to the whiskers. Pen men up together, and if they do not act like cattle it will be in spite of the pen! Women sprinkled through the cars keep the train upon its honor, if not upon the track, and elevate the lumbering thing from a common carrier to an educator.

Flying bedrooms are among the crowning achievements of railway travel. They are gorgeous. They remind you—the most of them—of the Hall of Representatives at Washington, which in its turn suggests a Chinese pagoda. They are luxuries. If you don't mind plunging endwards through your dreams at forty miles an hour; and if you don't care whom you sleep with; and if you never catch cold; and if you have no "reasonable doubt" as to getting out, provided the bed-room is mistaken for a dice-box, some night, and you are sure you will not come within an ace of throwing the deuce, there is nothing like them. Snores in many languages are let loose upon you, and feet from many boots. The porter has an appetite for boots. He sits up at night to get yours, no matter where you put them, and there he is in the morning, the boots in one hand and nothing in the other. It is pleasant, also, to have the drapery of your couch whisked one side every few minutes, just as you have dropped off into a doze, and a strange hand passed over your face, by somebody blundering about in quest of his berth.

Flying drawing-rooms deserve what winged bed-rooms need—unmitigated praise. The clank of wheels is shut out. You exult to the angles of your elbows, because there is room for them. You can go about in your revolving chair like a shingle chanticleer upon a barn-ridge. You read quietly, write comfortably, converse easily. It is home adrift.