There is nothing princely, now, about this coat; you wouldn't be specially proud of it if you could see it--just a plain fur overcoat--an old friend really--and still is. On cold nights I put it next to the frozen side of the car when I am lying in my berth. Often it covers my bed when the thermometer has dropped to zero and below, and I am sleeping with my window up. It has had experiences, too, this fur coat; a boy went home in it once with a broken leg, and his little sister rode with her arm around him, and once--but this isn't the place to tell about it. From the hotel to the station the spools of the hack paid out two wabbly parallel threads, stringing them around corners and into narrow streets and out again, so that the team could find its way back, perhaps. Another porter now met me--not sleepy this time, but very much awake; a big fellow in a jumper, with a number on his cap, who caught the red-banded trunk by the handle and "yanked" it (admirable word this!) on to the platform, shouting out in the same breath, "Cleveland via Battle Creek--no extras!" Then came the shriek of the incoming train--a local bound for Battle Creek and beyond. Two cars on this train, a passenger and a smoker. I lugged the fur overcoat and grip up the snow-clogged steps and entered the smoker. No Pullman on these locals, and, of course, no porter, and travellers, therefore, did their own lifting and lugging. The view down the perspective of this smoker was like a view across a battle-field, the long slanting lines of smoke telling of the carnage. Bodies (dead with sleep) were lying in every conceivable position, with legs and arms thrust up as if the victims had died in agony; some face down; others with gaping mouths and heads hooked across the seats. These heads and arms and legs made the passage of the aisle difficult. One--a leg--got tangled in my overcoat, and the head belonging to it said with a groan: "Where in h-- are you goin' with that----" [Illustration: Heads and arms and legs made the passage of the aisle difficult.] But I did not stop. I kept on my way to the passenger coach. It was not my fault that no Pullman with a porter attached was run on this local. There was no smoke in this coach. Neither was there any heat. There was nothing that could cause it. Something had happened, perhaps to the coupling of the steam hose so that it wouldn't couple; or the bottom was out of the hollow mockery called a heater; or the coal had been held up. Whatever the cause, a freight shed was a palm garden beside it. Nor had it any signs of a battle-field. It looked more like a ward in a hospital with most of the beds empty. Only one or two were occupied; one by a baby and another by its mother--the woman on one seat, her hand across the body of the child, and both fast asleep, one little bare foot peeping out from beneath the shawl that covered the child, like a pink flower a-bloom in a desert.