"Left Schenectady yesterday. Drawing-room car. Read Greek a good deal. At Syracuse I took the tumbler of the car and ran out to get some milk, etc., for supper. Spent 25 cents, and took my slender meal in the car, on a table. After this, slept profoundly all the evening; took the sleeper at Rochester, and slept like the dead, having had very insufficient sleep for two nights past. Was awakened early to get out at Cleveland--much detained by a young woman who got into the dressing-room before me, and stayed to make an elaborate toilet, keeping every one else out. When at last she came out, I said to her, 'Well, madam, you have taken your own time, to the inconvenience of everybody else. You are the most selfish woman I ever travelled with.' Could get only a cup of coffee and a roll at Cleveland--much confusion about cars--regained mine, started, and found that I had left my trunk at Cleveland, unchecked. Flew to conductor, who immediately took measures to have it forwarded. Must wait all day at Shelby, in the most forlorn hole I ever saw called a hotel. No parlor, a dark bedroom for me to stay in, a cold hell without the fire, and a very hot one with it. Dirty bed not made up, a sinister likeness of Schuyler Colfax hanging high on the wall, and a print of the managers of Andy Johnson's impeachment. I--in distress about my trunk--have telegraphed to Mansfield for the title of my lecture and learn that it is 'Polite Society.' Must give it without the manuscript, and must borrow a gown to give it in." "_Minnesota in Winter_ "The twistings and turnings of a lecture trip have brought me twice, in the present season, to Minnesota.... "To an Easterner, a daily walk or two is the first condition of health. Here, the frost seemed to enter one's very bones, and to make locomotion difficult.... Life at the hotel was mostly an anxious _tête-à-tête_ with an air-tight stove. Sometimes you roasted before it, sometimes you froze. As you crammed it with wood at night, you said, 'Will you, oh! will you burn till morning?' Finally, on the coldest night of all, and at that night's noon, you bade it farewell, on your way to the midnight train, and wondered whether you should be likely to go further and fare worse.... "After the lecture an informal sitting was held in the parlor of my hostess, at which there was much talk of the clubs of Boston; 'If I forget thee, O Jerusalem!' being the predominant tone in the minds of those present. And at noon, away, away, in the caboose of a freight car, to meet the passenger train at Owatonna, and so reach Minneapolis by early evening. "To travel in such a caboose is a somewhat rough experience. The dirt is grimy and of long standing. The pictures nailed up on the boards are not of an edifying description. The railroad employees who have admitted us into their place of refuge wear dirty overalls, and eat their dinner out of tin pails all afloat with hot coffee. One of my own sex keeps me in countenance....