His Majesty Baby and Some Common PeopleMaclaren, Ian
General
His Majesty Baby and Some Common People
Maclaren, Ian
Fiction; Short stories
something, and these remarkable men never rest unless when they are
asleep. About that even, I am not sure, and I was often tempted to draw
aside the curtain from a berth in a sleeping-car, and, had I done so, I
should not have been at all surprised to find our friend wide awake
with a cold cigar in his cheek, and rocking his knees for want of more
extensive accommodation. He has always rebelled against the ancient
custom of sleep, which he regards as a loss of time and an anachronism.
All that he can do is to spend the night in a sleeping car, which, as he
will tell you, annihilates time and space.
Foreigners travelling in the States in their innocence are amazed that
a delicate-minded nation, like the Americans, should be willing to sleep
after the fashion of the Pullman cars, and should not insist upon the
Continental cabin-car. The reason for the Arcadian simplicity of the
sections is not really economy, for no American would ever think twice
of spending a dollar; it is simply their abounding and dominant energy.
If you sleep in cabins at night, you must sit in cabins by day; and
this would mean a seclusion and repose which are very distasteful to
the high-strung American temperament. It would be like bottling up a
volatile gas; and one imagines that it might lead to an explosion, which
some day would break down the partitions and break up the car from end
to end. The American must see everything in his car and hear everything,
for which he depends upon the peculiar quality of the local voice;
and he must be at liberty to prowl about his car, and to sit with his
friends here and there. The car is his little world for the time, and he
is not going to live in a backwater.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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