Across the Plains, with Other Memories and EssaysStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Across the Plains, with Other Memories and Essays
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Essays; Monterey (Calif.) -- Description and travel; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
A great personage on an American train is the newsboy. He sells books
(such books!), papers, fruit, lollipops, and cigars; and on emigrant
journeys, soap, towels, tin washing dishes, tin coffee pitchers, coffee,
tea, sugar, and tinned eatables, mostly hash or beans and bacon. Early
next morning the newsboy went around the cars, and chumming on a more
extended principle became the order of the hour. It requires but a
copartnery of two to manage beds; but washing and eating can be carried
on most economically by a syndicate of three. I myself entered a little
after sunrise into articles of agreement, and became one of the firm of
Pennsylvania, Shakespeare, and Dubuque. Shakespeare was my own nickname
on the cars; Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow; and Dubuque, the name of
a place in the State of Iowa, that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma, and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or
smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I have never seen
tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of soap. The partners used
these instruments, one after another, according to the order of their
first awaking; and when the firm had finished there was no want of
borrowers. Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the
stove, and retired with the whole stock in trade to the platform of the
car. There he knelt down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the
woodwork or one elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash
his face and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train
is moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.
On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar, and necessary
vessels; and their operations are a type of what went on through all the
cars. Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning; at the
first station the natives would come on board with milk and eggs and
coffee cakes; and soon from end to end the car would be filled with
little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards. It was the pleasantest
hour of the day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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