"Will we make Battle Creek?" I asked, lifting my head from the grip. "Yes; be there in two minutes. He's blowin' for her now." Before the brakeman had tightened his clutch on his brake I was on my feet, had shifted overcoats, and was leaning against the fraudulent heater ready to face the storm. It would have been a far-seeing eye that could have discovered a hotel. All I saw as I dropped to the snow-covered platform was a row of gas jets, a lone figure pushing a truck piled up with luggage, one arm across his face to shield it from the cutting snow, and above me the gray mass of the station, its roof lost in the gloom of the wintry night. Then an unencumbered passenger, more active than I, passed me up the wind-swept platform, pushed open a door, and he and I stepped into-- What did I step into? Well, it would be impossible for you to imagine, and so I will tell you in a new paragraph. I stepped into a little gem of a station, looking like a library without its books, covered by a low roof, pierced by quaint windows and fitted with a big, deep, all-embracing fireplace ablaze with crackling logs resting on old-fashioned iron dogs, and beside them on the hearth a huge pile of birch wood. A room once seen never to be forgotten--a cosey box of a place, full of curved alcoves and half-round recesses with still smaller windows, and a table bearing a silver-plated ice-pitcher and two silver-plated goblets, _unchained_ (really, I am telling the truth), and big easy chairs, five or six of them, some of wicker-work with cushions, and a straw lounge big enough and long enough to stretch out on at full length. All this, remember, from out a night savage as a pack of wolves, and quite a thousand miles from home. I gravitated instinctively toward the fire, threw my overcoat and grip on the lounge and looked about me. The one passenger besides myself tarried long enough at the ticket office to speak to the clerk, and then passed on through the other door. He lived here, perhaps, or preferred the hotel--wherever that was--to the comforts of the station. The ticket-clerk locked his office, looked over to where I stood with my back to the blazing fire, my eyes roving around the room, and called out: "I'm going home now. Hotel's only three blocks away." "When is the down train due?" I asked. "Three-thirty." "Will it be on time?" "Never stole it. Search me! May be an hour late; may be two," he added with a laugh. "I'll stay here, if you don't mind." "Course--glad to have you. You'll want more wood, though.... John!"--this to the man who had been pushing the truck--"bring in some more wood; man's going to stay here for No. 8. Good-night." And he shut the door and went out into the storm, his coat-sleeve across his face.