It is inevitable that uncomfortable, as well as agreeable, experiences occur in travel. But the man who spends his time and thought in avoiding the one and seeking the other is steadily forging chains whose gall shall one day surpass the discomforts of a journey around the world. Arthur Benson in "Beside Still Waters" says that Hugh learned one thing at school, namely, that the disagreeable was not necessarily the intolerable. Some of us would do well to go back to school and learn this over again. I know of only two ways by which the discomforts of travel can be avoided. One is to ignore them, the other to stay at home. A fellow traveler told me that on one occasion, in the presence of a beautiful bit of mountain scenery, he overheard two ladies in anxious consultation comparing, article by article, the corresponding _menus_ of two rival hotels. The fact that three varieties of fish were offered at one, while only two were offered at the other, opened so animated a discussion of quantity as opposed to probable quality that the listener discretely withdrew. A lady on the Florida express, after reading a novel all day with an occasional interim, during which she gazed through her lorgnette with bored and anxious air, finally said to her companion, "I have not seen a single estate which compares to those in Brookline." Among the varieties of needless worry imposed upon the traveler by the insistent habit, none is more common, or more easily overcome, than the refusal to sleep unless noise and light are quite shut out. If the sufferer make of his insistent habit a servant, rather than a master, and instead of reiterating "I must have quiet and darkness," will confidently assert, "I must get over this nonsense," he will speedily learn that freedom from resentment, and a good circulation of air, are more conducive to sleep than either darkness or silence. The best drug for the sleepless traveler is the _æquo animo_ of Cicero. XIII. THE WORRIER AT THE TABLE These little things are great to little man. GOLDSMITH: _The Traveller_. The insistent habit of mind is nowhere more noticeable than in connection with the food. I have seen a hotel _habitué_, apparently sane, who invariably cut, or broke, his bread into minute particles, and minutely inspected each before placing it in his mouth. If this were a book of confessions, I should have myself to plead guilty, among worse things, to having avoided mince pie for weeks after encountering among other ingredients of this delicacy, a piece of broken glass.