It was on a chilly morning, not much after eight o'clock, that we left Detroit. I recall that, driving trainward, I closed the window of the taxicab; that the marble waiting room of the new station looked uncomfortably half awake, like a sleeper who has kicked the bedclothes off, and that the concrete platform outside was a playground for cold, boisterous gusts of wind. Our train had come from somewhere else. Entering the Pullman car, we found it in its night-time aspect. The narrow aisle, made narrower by its shroud of long green curtains, and by shoes and suit cases standing beside the berths, looked cavernous and gloomy, reminding me of a great rock fissure, the entrance to a cave I had once seen. Like a cave, too, it was cold with a musty and oppressive cold; a cold which embalmed the mingling smells of sleep and sleeping car--an odor as of Russia leather and banana peel ground into a damp pulp. Silently, gloomily, without removing our overcoats or gloves, we seated ourselves, gingerly, upon the bright green plush of the section nearest to the door, and tried to read our morning papers. Presently the train started. A thin, sick-looking Pullman conductor came and took our tickets, saying as few words as possible. A porter, in his sooty canvas coat, sagged miserably down the aisle. Also a waiter from the dining car, announcing breakfast in a cheerless tone. Breakfast! Who could think of breakfast in a place like that? For a long time, we sat in somber silence, without interest in each other or in life. To appreciate the full horror of a Pullman sleeping car it is not necessary to pass the night upon it; indeed, it is necessary _not_ to. If you have slept in the car, or tried to sleep, you arise with blunted faculties--the night has mercifully anesthetized you against the scenes and smells of morning. But if you board the car as we did, coming into it awake and fresh from out of doors, while it is yet asleep--then, and then only, do you realize its enormous ghastliness. Our first diversion--the faintest shadow of a speculative interest--came with a slight stirring of the curtains of the berth across the way. For, even in the most dismal sleeping car, there is always the remote chance, when those green curtains stir, that the Queen of Sheba is all radiant within, and that she will presently appear, like sunrise.