In the beginning things were different. Our great grand-daddies drew no class lines when they travelled, but were content to find shelter from the storm, or upon pleasant days from the showers of sparks scattered by the locomotive. But when the railroad began to stretch itself and to be a thing of reaches, it was found advisable to run trains at night in order to make quick communication between distant points. Travelling at night in the crude coaches of the early railroads was an abominable thing, and before the forties the old Cumberland Valley Railroad was operating some crude sort of sleeping-cars. Within another decade there was much experimenting of this sort. Old-timers on the Erie still remember the sleeping-cars that were built on that road soon after the close of the Civil War. There were six of them, more like summer cottages than cars, for the Erie was then of 6-foot gauge, and its cars were 12 feet wide. The berths were made up in crude form by hanging curtains from iron rods and bringing the bedding from a storage closet at the end of the car. There was a little less privacy in them than in the modern Pullman, but in the eyes of Jim Fisk, whose love of elegant luxury was first responsible for their construction, they were nothing less than palaces. One of them was named after Fisk and carried his portrait in an immense decorative medallion on each of its sides. The other cars were the _Jay Gould_--without decorative medallions--the _Morning Star_, the _Evening Star_, the _Queen City_, and the _Crescent City_. All you have to do to-day, to set an old Erie man's tongue wagging, is to speak of one of these cars. They were triumphs, and away back in that day and generation they cost $60,000 each. But while many men were fussing in futile ways to build comfortable cars for long journeys, a man named George M. Pullman, over in Western New York, was packing his goods and making ready to go to Chicago and build his world-famed car-works there. Pullman's cars survived the others. He bought in the Woodruff Company and some lesser concerns, and for many years his only important rival was the Wagner Palace Car Company, a Vanderbilt property. In course of time this too was absorbed, and the Pullman Company had virtual control of the luxurious part of American traffic, few railroads caring to run their own parlor and sleeping-car service.