RAILWAY TRAVELLING IN AMERICA.

Kumara Times, Issue 1124, 6 May 1880, Page 4

RAILWAY TRAVELLING IN AMERICA.

I have (says a writer in the Daily Telegraph) since my arrival on this continent, made several discoveries, certainly Infinitely of less moment to humanity at large than the discoveries of that wonderful Mr Edison, christened by the New York Herald “the Wizard of Menlo Park,!’ who is said to invent something new every three-quarters of an hour throughout the week, save on Sunday, which the Wizard devotes, between church hours, to the study of the writings of the Preacher who has warned us that all is vanity under the sun. Unimportant as are my discoveries, they are none the less personally interesting to me ; and among them is the consciousness of the peculiar condition of body and mind to which you are brought after spending, say, four nights of the seven in. a, Pullman sleeping car. In the first place, you are apt to fall into a fretful, nervous, and irritable state, and you begin to question the wisdom and justice of the laws which decline to recognise as justifiable homicide the assassination of the Sleeping Car Baby, whose mission in life seems to be carried up and down the land as a squalling warning to parents that if they do not have immediate recourse to Mrs Winslow’s soothing syrup they and the strangers within the gates of the Pullman will go raving mad. In the next place you to get so accustomed to making your toilette piecemeal, and to performing your ablutions in a marble pie-dish with the aid of a towel no bigger than a pocket handkerchief, that you begin to wonder what manner of people those can be who indulge in baths and tuba and such things, and by whom a clean paper collar every other day is not always deemed a fully adequate sacrifice to the Graces. You also cease to think it| startling if you find hairpins in you waistcoat pocket, and the presence of a frisette—l think that the reticulated black sausage in question is is called a frisette—in your boots does not produce any marked effect in your jaded mind. There are no stay busks in these days, lam told; but were a Duchease corset to turn up amony my railway rugs in a Pullman I shomld not be very much astonished. Again, you are continually having your boots cleaned, and the Cerberus of the “ sleeper” is always bringing you the wrong boots. You drift by degrees into a dubious and hazy state of incertitude as to whose boots are yours, or whether the little slippers with the high heels and the delicate black satin rosettes |with the cut-steel buckles may not have belonged to you in a previous state of existence. Finally, after three or four days’ Pullmanising, two absorbing impressions take possession of yon: The first is that this excessive sleeping accommodation will provoke an attack of insomnia which will have to be combated by musk pills, hydrate of chloral, Batley’s solution, cannabis indica, or the hypodermic injection of morphia; and next that the Pullman car is either a gipsy’s or a showman’s caravan. At one moment your distraught imagination leads you to believe that you must belong to the Rommany Rye, that your business in life is to sell brooms and baskets, to tinker pots and kettles, and to clip horses, and that the lady who is travelling with you is an adept at telling fortunes ; the next moment your fleeting fancies induce the assumption that you have passed into the services of Mrs Jarley, and that the people around you are waxworks—including a bighly-mechanical baby; and then you diverge at a mental tangent, now opining that you are Doctor Marigold, and that the little fair-haired girl in the corner is Uncle Dick’s Darling; now feeling that the spirit of Artemus Ward is coming over you, and that yours is the most Moral Wild Beast Show on the American Continent; and now that the Armadillo is your brother, the Pelican your uncle, the Spotted Girl your sister, and the Pig-faced Lady your mother-in-law.