I've been up and down and over and across in the surface cars, John, and my experience is ornamented by ripped trousers and discolored shins, but my intellect blows out a fuse every time I try to dope out the real way not to be an End-Seat Hog. Last Monday I jumped on an open-face car and it seemed that all the world was filled with joy and good wishes. I was smoking one of those Bad Boy cigars. I call it a Bad Boy cigar because as soon as it goes out it gets awful noisy. It was away uptown and the car was empty with the exception of a couple of benches. Two blocks further on the car stopped and a stout lady looked over the situation. I think she must have been color blind, because she didn't see the empty seats ahead and decided to cast her lot with me. It was a terrific moment. "Peter," I said to myself, "don't be a Hog--move over!" And virtue was triumphant. I moved over, and the stout lady settled squashfully into the end seat. Her displacement was about fifteen cents' worth of bench. After we had gone about ten blocks more every seat in the car in front and behind us was crowded, but nobody could get in our section because the fat lady held them at bay like Horatius held the bridge in the brave days of old. People would rush up to the car when it stopped, glance carelessly fore and aft until their eyes rested on the vacant seats in our direction, and then they would see the stout lady sitting there, as graceful as the sunken ships which used to block the harbor at Port Arthur. The people would look at the stout lady with no hope in their eyes, and then, with a sigh, they would retire and wait for the next car. No one was brave enough to climb the mountain which grew up between them and the promised land. After a while I began to get a toothache in my conscience. "Peter," I said to myself in a hoarse whisper, "perhaps after all _you_ were the Hog because you moved over! After the lady had climbed over you she would have kept on to the other end of the bench where now there is nothing but a sullen space." I began to insult myself. "Peter," I exclaimed inwardly, "what do _you_ know about the etiquette of the street car? According to the newspapers it is only a Man who can be a Hog on the street cars, and since you are the original cause of blockading the port when you moved over, _you_ must be the Hog!" Then I got so mad at myself that I refused to talk to myself any further. The next day I was riding downtown on the end seat with my mind made up to stay there and keep the harbor open for commerce. "Never," I said to myself, "never will anyone become a human Merrimac to bottle up the seating capacity of this particular bench while the blood flows through these veins and the flag of freedom waves above me." At the next corner a very thin little gentleman squeezed by me with a look of reproach on his face the like of which I hope never to see again, but I was Charles J. Glue and firm in the end seat.