It was during this delicious spin that I went into the smoking-room to have a pipe and something else. I sat down in a seat opposite to a man whose appearance stamped him as one of those quietly prosperous Americans who just go to their work and do it with such splendid thoroughness that the doing of it saves their country from falling into the social and political chaos that some other Americans would make of it if they could. He gave me a light, and we began talking. If it had been in an English train we might have glared at each other for five hundred miles without a word. As it was, we had begun to know each other in half an hour. We talked about the Hudson, and the Catskills, and West Point, and then about the train, and so the talk came back to the inevitable dollar. “A gorgeous train this,” I said; “far and away beyond anything we have in England. But,” I added with uncalculating haste, “it seems to me pretty expensive.” “Excuse me,” he said, “I don’t think you’ve figured it out. You’re going to San Francisco, thirty-two hundred miles from here. All the way you have a comfortable train,”—that was his lordly way of putting it,—“you have servants to wait on you day and night, a barber to shave you, a stenographer to dictate your letters to, and you never need get off the train except for the change at Chicago. “When you get to San Francisco you will find that the total cost works out at about three cents a mile, say three halfpence. I believe the legal first-class fare in England—without sleeping-accommodation, in fact without anything you have here except a place to sit down in—is threepence a mile.” I didn’t make the calculation, because when we subsequently exchanged cards I found I was talking to the President of the Mercantile Transportation Company, a man who knows just about as much of travel by land and sea as there is to be learnt. After this we got on to railroading generally. I learnt much, and in the learning thereof came to think even less of British railway methods than I had done before. I learnt why it was cheaper to carry grain a thousand miles from Chicago to New York than it is to carry it a couple of hundred miles from Yorkshire to London; why cattle can be carried over thousands of miles of prairie at less cost than over hundreds of miles of English railroads; and many other things all bearing on the question of the dollar and how to save it—for your true American is just as keen on saving as he is lavish in spending—which I thought might well be taught and still better learnt on this side. It was during this conversation that I had an example of that absolutely disinterested kindness with which the wanderer so often meets in America and so seldom in England. “By the way,” said Mr. President, “have you taken your berth from Chicago in the Overland Limited?” “No,” I said; “I was told I could telegraph for it from Buffalo.”