Then we who are shaking our sides with laughter on the front seat, congratulating ourselves, like the Pharisees, that we are not as they are, suddenly find ourselves sprawling on the floor. When we regain our places, the M. D. and Vice-President come forward with a rush and embrace us fraternally. We get our legs so mixed up with our neighbors' that we can hardly tell whether our feet belong to ourselves or to somebody else! The light weights of the party are knocked about like shuttlecocks, while the solid ones roll like those ridiculous, round-bottomed, grinning images that we see in the toy-shops! I find myself going up and down after the manner of Sancho Panza when tossed in a blanket. Our dinners are well settled when we reach Grindstone,--our stopping-place for the night. The town is located on Grindstone Creek, and consists of a log-house and stable, surrounded by burnt timber. Half a dozen men who have footed it from Duluth are nursing their sore feet in one of the three rooms on the ground-floor. The furniture of the apartment consists of a cast-iron stove in the centre and three rough benches against the walls, which are papered with pictorial newspapers. The occupants are discussing the future prospects of Duluth. "It is a right smart chance of a place," says a tall, thin-faced, long-nosed man stretched in one corner. We know by the utterance of that one sentence that he is from southern Illinois. "They have got their _i_-deas pretty well up though, on real estate, for a town that is only a yearlin'," says another, who, by his accent of the _i_, has shown that he too is a Western man. An Amazon in stature, with a round red face, hurries up a supper of pork and fried eggs; and then we who are going northward, and they who are travelling southward,--sixteen of us, all told,--creep up the narrow stairway to the unfinished garret, and go to bed, with our noses close to the rafters and long shingles, through the crevices of which we look out and behold the stars marching in grand procession across the midnight sky. It is glorious to lie there and feel the _tire_ and weariness go out of us; to look into the "eternities of space," as Carlyle says of the vault of heaven. But our profound thoughts upon the measureless empyrean are brought down to sublunary things by four of the sleepers who engage in a snoring contest. The race is so close, neck and neck, or rather nose and nose, that it is impossible to decide whether the deep sonorous--not to say _snorous_?--bass of the big fellow by the window, or the sharp, piercing, energetic snorts of the thin-faced, lantern-jawed, long-nosed man from southern Illinois, is entitled to the trumpet or horn, or whatever may be appropriate to signalize such championship. Either of them would have been a power in the grand chorus of the Coliseum Jubilee, and both together would be equal to the big organ!