He collided with a small train-boy singing his nasal lay, but it was the behemoth and not the train-boy that collapsed into a seat, sprawling as helplessly as a mammoth oyster on a table-cloth. The porter rushed to his aid and hoisted him to his feet with an uneasy sense of impending trouble. He felt as if someone had left a monstrous baby on his doorstep, but all he said was: "Tickets, please." There ensued a long search, fat, flabby hands flopping and fumbling from pocket to pocket. Once more the porter was the discoverer. "I see it. Don't look no mo'. Here it is--up in yo' hatband." He lifted it out and chuckled. "Had it right next his brains and couldn't rememba!" He took up the appropriately huge luggage of the bibulous wanderer and led him to the other end of the aisle. "Numba two is yours, sah. Right heah--all nice and cosy, and already made up." The big man looked through the curtains into the cabined confinement, and groaned: "That! Haven't you got a man's size berth?" "Sorry, sah. That's as big a bunk as they is on the train." "Have I got to be locked up in that pigeon-hole for--for how many days is it to Reno?" "Reno?" The porter greeted that meaningful name with a smile. "We're doo in Reno the--the--the mawnin' of the fo'th day, sah. Yassah." He put the baggage down and started away, but the sad fat man seized his hand, with great emotion: "Don't leave me all alone in there, porter, for I'm a broken-hearted man." "Is that so? Too bad, sah." "Were you ever a broken-hearted man, porter?" "Always, sah." "Did you ever put your trust in a false-hearted woman?" "Often, sah." "Was she ever true to you, porter?" "Never, sah." "Porter, we are partners in mis-sis-ery." And he wrung the rough, black hand with a solemnity that embarrassed the porter almost as much as it would have embarrassed the passenger himself if he could have understood what he was doing. The porter disengaged himself with a patient but hasty: "I'm afraid you'll have to 'scuse me. I got to he'p the other passengers on bode." "Don't let me keep you from your duty. Duty is the--the----" But he could not remember what duty was, and he would have dropped off to sleep, if he had not been startled by a familiar voice which the porter had luckily escaped. "Pawtah! Pawtah! Can't you raise this light--or rather can't you lower it? Pawtah! This light is so infernally dim I can't read." To the Englishman's intense amazement his call brought to him not the porter, but a rising moon with the profound query: "Whass a li'l thing like dim light, when the light of your life has gone out?" "I beg your pardon?" Without further invitation, the mammoth descended on the Englishman's territory. "I'm a broken-hearted man, Mr.--Mr.--I didn't get your name." "Er--ah--I dare say."