as coals, and lived on pumpkins in a swamp. And still we sit up, long past midnight, for never again in our lives probably shall we have such an experience as this, so unearthly in its surroundings--forests that crowded in upon the rails and hung threateningly over the cars, pools that lay glistening in the moonlight round the foot of the trees, the air as thick as porridge with the yanking of brazen-throated frogs, and the screaming of tinlunged cicadas, yet all the time alive with lantern-tailed insects--just as if the clamour of frogs and cicadas struck fireflies out of each other in the same way that flint and steel strike flashes, or as if their recriminations caught fire like Acestes' arrows as they flew, and peopled the inflammable air with phosphorescent tips of flame--a battery of din perpetually grinding out showers of electric sparks. And to make us remember this night the cars bumped abominably over the dislocated sleepers and the sunken rails, as the Spanish father whipped his son that he might never forget the day on which he saw a live salamander; and the engine flew a streamer of sparks and ink-black smoke, till it felt as if we were riding to Hades on a three-legged dragon. But it came to sleep at last, and we went to bed, leaving the moonlit country to the vagaries of the fireflies and the infinite exultations of the frogs. Awaking in the morning with "the grey wolf's tail" still in the sky, what a wonderful change had settled on the scene! The same swamped forests on either side of us: the same gloomy trees and the same sulky-looking pools; but a dull leaden Silence supreme! Where were the creatures that had crowded the moonlight? You might live a whole month of mornings without suspecting that there were any such things in Arkansas as frogs or katydids or fireflies! I should have gone to sleep again if I had not caught sight of our new porter, or brakeman. He happened to be laughing, and the corners of his mouth, so it seemed to me, must have met behind. I need hardly say he was a negro. But at first I thought he was a practical joke. I took the earliest opportunity of looking at the back of his neck, to see what kept his head together when he laughed. But I only saw a brass button. I should not have thought that was enough to keep a man's skull together, if I had not seen it. And he was always laughing, so that there was nearly as much expression on the back of his head as on the front. He laughed all round. I felt inclined to advise him to get his mouth mended, or to tell him about "a stitch in time." But he seemed so happy I did not think it worth while.