It's the fault of your depots. They're the biggest things you have, and it isn't fair for you to come at me with your biggest things first. Every time I start for New York I swear to myself that I'm going to go into a fifty thousand dollar dining-room full of waiters far above my station, and tuck my napkin in my collar, just to show I'm a free-born citizen; and I'm going to trust my life to crossing policemen, and go by forty-story buildings without even flipping an eye up the corner and counting the stories by threes. I'm mighty sophisticated until I hit the city and get out into a depot which has a town square under roof and a waiting-room so high that they have to shut the front door to keep the thunder storms out. Then I begin to shrink. And by the time I've walked from Yonkers or thereabouts, clean through the station and out of a two-block hallway, with more stores on either side than there are in all Homeburg, and have committed my soul to the nearest taxicab pirate, I feel like a cheese mite in the great hall of Karnak. No, sir; when I get into a big city depot, I'm a country Jake, and I need a compass and kind words. I've suffered a lot from those depots. I missed a train in Washington once because I figured it would take me only ten minutes to go from my hotel to the train. But I counted only the distance to the front door of the Union Station. By the time I'd journeyed on through the fool thing, my train had gone. Once I missed a train in the Boston station because I didn't know which one of the thirty tracks my train was on. I guessed it was somewhere to the right, and I guessed wrong. It was twenty-four tracks away to the left, and I couldn't get back in time. So I went into their waiting-room, which is as big as a New England cornfield and has all the benches named for various towns. I had to stand up two hours because I couldn't find the Homeburg bench. I'm an admirer of big cities, Jim, and I wouldn't have you take a foot off your Woolworth building, or a single crashity!! bang!! out of your subways, but I wish there was a little more coziness in your depots. Why, at Homeburg I'm nearer the train at my house than I am in New York after I've got to the station. It's great to have a depot so big that it takes the place of mountain scenery, but it's hard on the poor traveler, even if it does have all the comforts of away-from-home in it. And then it swallows up things so. It takes away all the pleasure of having a railroad in the town. I suppose five hundred trains come into this station every day, but they're just trains--nothing more. You don't get any fun or information or excitement out of them. You can't even chase them--they bang a gate in your face when you try. I'll bet you don't get as much comfort and fun out of all these five hundred trains, Jim, as we do out of the 4:11 train at Homeburg.