serenity would have been sublimity, but to stay in the midst of peril when two steps would take one out of it is idiocy.  And that there was peril is conclusively shown by the fact that the very next day the Eastern Railroad Depot took fire and was burned to the ground.  I have in my own mind no doubt that it was a continuation of the same fire, and if we had stayed in the car much longer, we should have shared the same fate.

We found Jeru to be a pleasant city, with only one fault:  the inhabitants will crowd into a car before passengers can get out; consequently the heads of the two columns collide near the car-door, and there is a general choke.  Otherwise Jeru is a delightful city.  It is famous for its beautiful women.  Its railroad-station is a magnificent piece of architecture.  Its men are retired East-India merchants.  Everybody in Jeru is rich and has real estate.  The houses in Jeru are three stories high and face on the Common.  People in Jeru are well-dressed and well-bred, and they all came over in the Mayflower.

We stopped in Jeru five minutes.

When we were ready to continue our travels Halicarnassus seceded into the smoking-car, and while the engine was shrieking off its inertia, a small boy, laboring under great agitation, hurried in, darted up to me, and, thrusting a pinchbeck ring with a pink glass in it into my face, exclaimed, in a hoarse whisper,—­

“A beautiful ring, Ma’am!  I’ve just picked it up.  Can’t stop to find the owner.  Worth a dollar, Ma’am; but if you’ll give me fifty cents”—­

“Boy!”

I rose fiercely, convulsively, in my seat, drew one long breath, but whether he thought I was going to kill him,—­I dare say I looked it,—­or whether he saw a sheriff behind, or a phantom gallows before, I know not; but without waiting for the thunderbolt to strike, he rushed from the car as precipitately as he had rushed in.  I was angry,—­not because I was to have been cheated, for I have been repeatedly and atrociously cheated and only smiled, but because the rascal dared attempt on me such a threadbare, ragged, shoddy trick as that.  Do I look like a rough-hewn, unseasoned backwoodsman?  Have I the air of never having read a newspaper?  Is there a patent innocence of eye-teeth in my demeanor?  Oh, Jeru!  Jeru!  Somewhere in your virtuous bosom you are nourishing a viper, for I have felt his fangs.  Woe unto you, if you do not strangle him before he develops into mature anacondaism!  In point of natural history I am not sure that vipers do grow up anacondas, but for the purposes of moral philosophy the development theory answers perfectly well.

In Boston a dreadful thing happened to me,—­a thing too horrible to relate.  I have no reason to suppose that the outrage was intentional; but if I were absolute monarch of all I survey, there is one house in one street in Boston which I would have razed to the ground; and tobacco I would banish forever from the haunts of civilization.