stiffness with the rest of the lady’s apparel and disposition not to be friendly.  On the seat opposite, which from the nature of my ticket and the case I should have supposed belonged to me, were piled two large bundles, a shiny black bag, a black silk coat, also stiff like the lady, an umbrella, two magazines and a basket of fruit.  No place was apparent for me or my bags or my overcoat.  It seemed as if it would be best for me to stand in the middle of the car all the way to the State of Harpeth so that the lady’s stiffness be not disarranged.  I did not know what I should do, and my knees began again to feel weak in that gray tweed and to be cold for their accustomed skirts, but the lady looked out of the window and said not a single word.  I did not have any convenient cup of tea in my hand to throw in that lady’s face in a manner that would not be permitted a gentleman, but if I had had the very lovely lorgnette that has descended to me from my Great Grandmamma, the wife of the old Flanders grandsire, I would have settled the matter with very little trouble in an entirely ladylike manner.  As it was, I did not know what to do but stand and then stand longer.  Just at the moment when I began to feel that I would either be forced to forget that I was a gentleman or to faint as a lady, a very nice man touched me on the elbow and said: 

“Just drop your bag on her feet and come into the smoker.  She’s got your game beat,” and he passed on down the aisle of that car.  I acted upon that very kind advice and I am glad that from the weight of the bag I got at least a small action from the stiff lady if only a groan and a glare.  Also I should have been grateful that she had so discourteously treated me so that I was fortunate to receive the attention of Mr. George Slade of Detroit as my first experience in American manhood.

That Mr. Slade of Detroit is a man of remarkable adventures, and he related to me many of them as he sat with me in the place reserved for the smoking of gentlemen.  They were all about ladies who resided in the different towns to which he traveled in the pursuit of selling cigars, and he called them all by the name of “skirts.”

“I tell you, Mr. Dago, there is a skirt in Louisville, Kentucky, that is such a peach that you’d call for the cream jug on sight.  It would pay you to stop off and see her.  She’s on the level all right, but any friend that took a line from me would be nuts to her.  See?” And he bestowed upon me a pleasant wink from his eye.  To that I made no response.  I could make none.

“Now, Mr. Robert Carruthers,” I had said to myself at the beginning of the first story of “skirts,” “you will find yourself obliged to be in the presence of men as one of their kind and not throw scalding tea in their faces when they speak of ladies.  You are of a great ignorance about the brute that is known as man and you must learn to know him as you do the wild hog in hunting.”  But even for the sake of a larger education I could not remain, and I fled from that Mr. Slade of Detroit in one half hour back to the arms of the stiff lady.  But when I arrived there I found she had had me removed from her as far as possible to the other end of the car, where I found my bags deposited beside one marked “G.  Slade, Detroit.”