Mr. Sharper began to see that I wasn’t his man, and he presently got up and took a seat just in front of his pal. On the same seat was a young man who evidently had not made a regular business of traveling, and with him Mr. Sharper struck up an animated conversation, soon gaining his confidence. By and by, he introduced a very curious puzzle, with two cups and ivory balls, which he said he had bought that day from an Italian peddler with one eye, who had lost a brother and two wives in a storm at sea, on his way to this country. I was not near enough to see the exact construction of the cups and balls; but it was not long before he got up a bet about them, with the green traveler. His confederate, sitting on the seat between him and me, still pretending to be a stranger to him, made a sham bet of thirty dollars, and the other man on the same seat—also a man who had never been sharpened on the grindstone of experience—bet fifteen dollars. The money was put up in the hands of a passenger, and, of course, Sharper won. He and his confederate got off at the next station, each about twenty dollars “in;” leaving a couple of foolish passengers so much poorer, and, it is to be hoped, so much wiser. Reader, in your travels, beware of friendly strangers. John Smith always bewares of ’em, and it pays. A description of a forty hours’ ride by railroad, would prove as tiresome to the reader as the ride always does to me. It is a delightful thing, in fine weather, to take a ride of fifty or a hundred miles on a train; to see the fields, and houses, and gardens, and barns, and woods, and fences flying past you, and to feel that lightning would get tired before it could catch you: but when you have to ride a thousand miles, as I have often done, the thing becomes frightfully monotonous, and is any thing but a pastime. Especially when night comes does the ride grow tiresome. As for sleeping-cars, I have long since vetoed _them_, as far as I am concerned. I decide that they are a nuisance, and I believe the majority of travelers will ratify and endorse my decision—and thus render it legal. I never slept in one yet, that I did not suffer all the time, either from heat or cold. Such a thing as an even or moderate temperature, I never experienced in a sleeping-car. Then the space! To be stuffed, as tight as the wad in a pop-gun, into a narrow cell, which they honor with the appellation of “berth,” a cell so narrow as to evoke unpleasant contemplations of the anticipated long and narrow home we must all go to; so narrow and contracted that you haven’t room for your elbows; so narrow that you can’t turn over without getting out upon the floor for the purpose; so narrow and close that, as you lie on your back, you are afraid to wink, lest you should scrape your eyelids against the ceiling above you and break the lashes off: to be crammed into a place like this, I say, with an implied promise of repose, is the opposite extreme of extraordinary felicity!