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far from home. They are so many convergent threads of different strength and fineness, twisted into one on the Cis-atlantic spindle, to be then woven into the broad and ever-widening web. The weaving process may possibly be too much hurried; and that is about the only compensation we have for the loss of so many hundreds of thousands of allies in our contest with the wilderness.

Is there no grand jury for the train-boy? Can he not be presented and abated as a nuisance? He runs every day the gauntlet of hundreds of these inquests, strung along the thousands of miles he makes hateful to the traveller. Yet he still treads unchecked and unabashed his endless round of evil-doing. To realize the enormity of the wrong let us fancy him abandoning his stronghold in the railway carriage and adventuring his raids on terra firma. How long would the most patient of publics endure his promenading the sidewalk three times an hour each way, and every time thrusting upon the occupants of every house, at work, at amusement or at meals, a package of candy, a semi-rancid orange, or a wholly rancid novel? He would be clapped into quod and permanently extinguished before completing his third tour of the square.

The railways have no police to do us this good turn. If they have any, this youth of the period has purchased their silence. The passenger is handed over to him like a sheep, his helpless victim, bought with a price. No means of escape are left open. Frowns and cold shoulders are thrown away on him. A calm ignoring of his existence is but a spur to his determination to conquer you. He sets you down as a foeman worthy of his steel. ‘"Ah, old fellow!" he soliloquizes as he takes your measure, "I'll have you yet. If you are not politician enough to want yesterday morning's triple sheet Tomahawk, you will want to bury yourself from my reach in the many tables of last year's Railway Guide, or, if not that, you'll be glad, after a while, to let me soothe you with a willow-leaf Havana." Revolving these thoughts, he strolls imperturbably on, for he understands you perfectly, as he does all the rest of his various victims.

Discouragement is a word he has no use for. He does not seem to sell anything. Sometimes you will listlessly yet curiously observe his career, and settle back into your seat in luxurious satisfaction as he emerges through the rear door without having effected a solitary transaction. Better still, he caught his basket in the doorway, and spilled some of his oranges under the feet of yon slumbering rustic: no, he recovered himself too soon. He never drops anything except of set purpose—a circular or the book it recommends. A passenger will occasionally do it, or be made to seem to do it, and then have of course to purchase the article under foot: but that is a trick of trade, and one the average train-boy is not master of, the leaders of the craft only being adepts in it.

On some lines the train-boy was formerly utilized in summer by handing round ice-water to the thirsty at stated intervals. But the thirsty were a minority: the cans would splash on the sufficiently moist majority, and that device for contriving a raison d’êlre for the train-boy was abandoned. He is now more inexcusable and more ubiquitous than ever. He and cinders are twin evils born of fast schedules. To add four or five miles an hour to the old rate, station refreshment-booths and platform-peddlers and spark-catchers have been abolished. The local peanut interest has been ruthlessly immolated on the altar of Hurry, and the incense of the same rite poured in, thick and black, at every car-window and ventilator. Let us hope for an early change in the mode of worship. This acolyte is unknown in Europe. Travellers there manage to lunch, read and smoke very comfortably without him; and they can do it here with perfect ease if similar methods are adopted for supplying their real wants.