Even the cheaper companies have their own cars--gaudy affairs most of them, their battered sides still reflecting the brilliancy of some gifted sign-painter. You must remember seeing them in the long ago, back there at the home-town, stuck in the long siding next the coal-shed, and surrounded by admiring youth, getting its first faint taint of the mania. The All-Star Imperial Minstrel Troupes, and the Uncle Tom shows, are the graveyards of the private cars. Proud equipages that in their days have housed real magnates and have been the theatres of what we like mysteriously to call "big deals," once supplanted, drop quickly down the scale of elegance. In their last days they come to the hard use of some itinerant band of entertainers, to squeak their rusty joints and worn frames as if in protest against a fly-by-night existence over jerkwater railroad branches. Come back again to those cars you see at the college football games, the travelling private palaces that migrate up to Newport, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks in summer; that flock south in the winter like the birds. The astonishing thing is that few of these cars are owned by the persons who are using them. Of course, as we have already said, if a man can lay claim to some railroad connection, he can get his car hauled free over other lines and, perhaps, get it built for him; but more of that in a moment. There are probably not more than 40 private cars in the land that are owned by persons not connected with the railroads. This is an astonishingly low figure, considering the number of these craft that are constantly drifting about our 200,000 miles of track. Some society folk have cars as a part of their daily life, but the storage costs are apt to cause a man to think twice before he buys one. Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Morgan have managed to worry along very comfortably without contracting the disease. As a rule, both of these men are willing to accept the comfort of any of the fast limited trains that form part of the luxurious equipment of the American railroad. But the fact remains that the average citizen, when he is felled by an intermittent attack of the private-car mania, is content to hire one of the very comfortable equipages that the Pullman Company keeps ready at big terminals at various points across the country. The arrangements for these are exclusive of the price paid to the railroad companies for their haul. A complete private car, equipped with staterooms, baths, private dining-room, observation parlor and the like, costs seventy-five dollars a day. For two or more days this rate drops to fifty dollars a day. An extra charge is made for food; but the railroad will deliver the car without charge at the point from which you wish to begin your journey. [Illustration: CONNECTING DRAWING ROOM AND STATE ROOM] [Illustration: "A MAN MAY HAVE AS FINE A BED IN A SLEEPING CAR AS IN THE BEST HOTEL IN ALL THE LAND"]