and seems to be digesting some piece of commercial information. He then rises hurriedly, as if he had been called on the telephone, and makes for the smoking-car, where he will discuss “Expansion” with vivid, picturesque speech, and get through a cigar with incredible celerity. Within fifteen minutes he is in his place again; and, a little afterwards, wearying of idleness, he is chewing the end of a cigar, which is a substitute for smoking and saves him from being wearied with his own company. Half an hour before the train is due at his station, he is being brushed, and getting ready to alight. Before the train has reached the outskirts of the town, he has secured his place in a procession which stands in single file in the narrow exit passage from the Pullman. Each man is ready dressed for business and has his valise in his hand; he is counting the minutes before he can alight, and is envying the man at the head of the procession, who will have a start of about two seconds. This will give him a great advantage in business, and he may never be overtaken by his competitors till evening. Suppose he lands at 6 a.m., he will find breakfast ready in a hotel, and half a dozen men eating as if their lives depended upon finishing by 6.15 a.m. Before seven he will have disposed of a pile of letters, dictating answers to a typist attached to the hotel, he will have telegraphed in all directions, and made half a dozen appointments in the town by telephone. Within the forenoon he will finish his business and depart for some neighbouring town, lunching on the cars. The second town he will dispose of in the afternoon, and that evening go on board the sleeper to travel 400 miles to a third town, where he is going to negotiate a contract at 8 o'clock next morning. If you sympathize with him, and wonder how flesh and blood can stand the speed, he accepts your sympathy as a compliment, and assures you that he never sleeps so well as on the cars. He never seems to be out of sorts or out of temper: he is always thoroughly alive and quite good-natured. Sometimes he may seem for a moment annoyed, when he cannot telegraph as often as he wants along the line, or when the train is not on time, that he may make a connection. Nothing would wound him so deeply as to “get left,” and he can only affect to be unconscious when some one declares that he is “no slouch, and that there are no flies on him.” If he is obliged to spend two hours doing nothing in a hotel, when business is over, then he rocks himself and smokes, and it is a wonderful spectacle for an indolent Englishman to look down from the gallery that commands the hall of the hotel, and to see fifty able-bodied fellow-men who have worked already twelve hours, at least, and put eighteen hours' work into the time, all in motion. (One wonders why this motion is not utilized to drive something.) He discovers how unlike cousins may be, for an Englishman never moves unless he is obliged to or unless he wants to shoot