A Sleeping-Car Experience
It was in a Pullman sleeping-car on a Western road. After that first plunge into
unconsciousness which the weary traveler takes on getting into his berth, I awakened to
the dreadful revelation that I had been asleep only two hours. The greater part of a long
winter night was before me to face with staring eyes.
Finding it impossible to sleep, I lay there wondering a number of things: why, for
instance, the Pullman sleeping-car blankets were unlike other blankets; why they were
like squares cut out of cold buckwheat cakes, and why they clung to you when you turned
over, and lay heavy on you without warmth; why the curtains before you could not have
been made opaque, without being so thick and suffocating; why it would not be as well to
sit up all night half asleep in an ordinary passenger-car as to lie awake all night in a
Pullman. But the snoring of my fellow-passengers answered this question in the negative.
With the recollection of last night's dinner weighing on me as heavily and coldly as the
blankets, I began wondering why, over the whole extent of the continent, there was no
local dish; why the bill of fare at restaurant and hotel was invariably only a weak reflex
of the metropolitan hostelries; why the entrees were always the same, only more or less
badly cooked; why the traveling American always was supposed to demand turkey and
cold cranberry sauce; why the pretty waiter-girl apparently shuffled your plates behind
your back, and then dealt them over your shoulder in a semicircle, as if they were a hand
at cards, and not always a good one? Why, having done this, she instantly retired to the
nearest wall, and gazed at you scornfully, as one who would say, "Fair sir, though lowly,
I am proud; if thou dost imagine that I would permit undue familiarity of speech,
beware!" And then I began to think of and dread the coming breakfast; to wonder why
the ham was always cut half an inch thick, and why the fried egg always resembled a
glass eye that visibly winked at you with diabolical dyspeptic suggestions; to wonder if
the buckwheat cakes, the eating of which requires a certain degree of artistic preparation
and deliberation, would be brought in as usual one minute before the train started. And
then I had a vivid recollection of a fellow-passenger who, at a certain breakfast station in
Illinois, frantically enwrapped his portion of this national pastry in his red bandana
handkerchief, took it into the smoking-car, and quietly devoured it en route.
Lying broad awake, I could not help making some observations which I think are not
noticed by the day traveler. First, that the speed of a train is not equal or continuous. That
at certain times the engine apparently starts up, and says to the baggage train behind it,
"Come, come, this won't do! Why, it's nearly half-past two; how in h-ll shall we get
through? Don't you talk to ME. Pooh, pooh!" delivered in that rhythmical fashion which
all meditation assumes on a railway train. Exempli gratia: One night, having raised my
window-curtain to look over a moonlit snowy landscape, as I pulled it down the lines of a
popular comic song flashed across me. Fatal error! The train instantly took it up, and
during the rest of the night I was haunted by this awful refrain: "Pull down the bel-lind,
pull down the bel-lind; simebody's klink klink, O don't be shoo-shoo!" Naturally this
differs on the different railways. On the New York Central, where the road-bed is quite
