Now they have almost stopped, going at only seventy miles the hour.  The long line of depot lamps are flashing along the track.  On the platform of the station are the lovers who are waiting for their betrothed, and parents who have come down to greet their children, returned with a fortune, and wives who have not been able to eat or drink since their spouses went away three weeks before.  As the cushioned train flashes into the depot and stops, wedding bells peal, and the gong of many banquets sounds, and white arms are flung about necks, reckless of mistake, and innumerable percussions of affection echo through the depot, so crisp and loud that they wake the conductor, who thought that the boisterous smack was on his own cheek, but finds that he is nothing but a bachelor railroad man, with a lantern, at midnight getting out into a snow bank.

Application:  Get an easy position when you sleep, if you have any choice between angels and gorgons.  At midnight, seizing a chair, I ran into the next room, resolving to kill, at the first stroke, the ruffian who was murdering a member of my household.  But there was no ruffian.  The sweet girl had, during the day, been reading of St. Bartholomew’s massacre, and was now lying on her back, dreaming it all over again.  When dreams find anyone lying flat on the back, they cry out, “Here is a flat surface on which to skate and play ball,” and from scalp to toe they sport themselves.  The hardest nag in all the world to ride is the nightmare.  Many think that sleep is lost time.  But the style of your work will be mightily affected by the style of your slumber.  Sound Asleep is sister of Wide Awake.  Adam was the only man who ever lost a rib by napping too soundly; but when he woke up, he found that, instead of the twelve ribs with which he started, he really had nigh two dozen.  By this I prove that sleep is not subtraction, but addition.  This very night may that angel put balm on both your eyelids five minutes after you touch the pillow!

CHAPTER XXII.

Push & pull.

We have long been acquainted with a business firm whose praises have never been sung.  I doubt whether their names are ever mentioned on Exchange.  They seem to be doing more business and have more branch houses than the Stewarts or Lippincotts.  You see their names almost everywhere on the door.  It is the firm of Push & Pull.  They generally have one of their partners’ names on outside of the door, and the other on the inside:  “Push” on the outside and “Pull” on the inside.  I have found their business-houses in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, London and Edinburgh.  It is under my eye, whether I go to buy a hat, a shawl, or a paper of pins, or watch, or ream of foolscap.  They are in all kinds of business; and from the way they branch out, and put up new stores, and multiply their signboards on the outside and inside of doors, I conclude that the largest business firm on earth to-day is Push & Pull.