Conspicuous among us was a distinguished surgeon of Chicago; in fact, so distinguished that he has had a very rare and expensive disease named for him, which is as distinguished as a physician ever gets to be in this country. Abroad he would be decorated or knighted. Here we name something painful after him and it seems to fill the bill just as well. This surgeon was very distinguished and also very exclusive. After you scaled down from him, riding in solitary splendor in his drawing room, with kitbags full of symptoms and diagnoses scattered round, we became a mixed tourist outfit. I would not want to say that any of the persons on our train were impossible, because that sounds snobbish; but I will say this--some of them were highly improbable. There was the bride, who put on her automobile goggles and her automobile veil as soon as we pulled out of the Chicago yards and never took them off again--except possibly when sleeping. I presume she wanted to show the rest of us that she was accustomed to traveling at a high rate of speed. If the bridegroom had only bethought him to carry one of those siren horns under his arm, and had tooted it whenever we went around a curve, the illusion would have been complete. There was also the middle-aged lady with the camera habit. Any time the train stopped, or any time it behaved as though it thought of stopping, out on the platform would pop this lady, armed with her little accordion-plaited camera, with the lens focused and the little atomizer bulb dangling down, all ready to take a few pictures. She snapshotted watertanks, whistling posts, lunch stands, section houses, grade crossings and holes in the snowshed--also scenery, people and climate. A two-by-four photograph of a mountain that's a mile high must be a most splendid reminder of the beauties of Nature to take home with you from a trip. There was the conversational youth in the Norfolk jacket, who was going out West to fill an important vacancy in a large business house--he told us so himself. It was a good selection, too. If I had a vacancy that I wanted filled in such a way that other people would think the vacancy was still there, this youth would have been my candidate. [Illustration: EVIDENTLY HE BELIEVED THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST HIM WAS WIDESPREAD]