become accustomed to his trunk.  It puzzled me to know how or why he had been billeted on my palatial shelf, for the whole of which I had paid; but as it was rather a cold night, and there was something respectable in the outline of that Roman nose, I turned my back on him and determined to accept the situation, soothing myself with the reflection that if I repeated the assault upon his nose, such an accident must be excused as a fortuitous result of his unauthorized intrusion.

I had just got freshly enveloped in the “honey-dew of slumber” when my compagnon de voyage began to snore, and in the most unendurable manner, the effect of which was nothing improved by his proximity.  It seemed to penetrate every sense and sensation of my body, and to intensify the extreme of misery which I had begun to endure in the hard effort to sleep.  His snore was a medley of snuffing and snorting, with an abortive demi-semi aristocratic sort of a sneeze; while to add to the effect of this three-stringed inspiration there was in each aspiration a tremulous and swooning neigh.  I had been reading The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man for several previous days, and began to think I had discovered some wandering Jewish lost link between man and the monkey, and that I actually had him or it for a bedfellow; but by the dim light of the car-lamps I managed to see his hands, which had orthodox nails.  I was now thoroughly awake, and found myself the victim of a perfect bedlam of snorers from one end of the car to the other, making a concatenation of hideous noises only to be equaled by a menagerie; though, to give the devil his due, a earful of wild animals would never make such an uproar when fast asleep.

It is a well-known fact that when one’s ears prick up at night and find the slightest noise an obstacle to slumber, after much tossing and turning, and some imprecating, tired Nature will finally succumb from sheer exhaustion:  she even conquers the howling of dogs holding converse with the moon and the cater-wauling of enamored cats.  Cats, and even cataracts, I have defied, but of all noises to keep a sober man awake I know of none to take the palm from the snoring in that car.  There seemed to be a bond of sympathy, too, among the snorers, for those who did not snore were the only ones who did not sleep.

The varieties of sound were so intensely ridiculous that at first I found it amusing to listen to the performance.  A musical ear might have had novel practice by classifying the intonations.  The war-whooping snore of my bedfellow changed at times into a deep and mellow bass.  To the right of us, on the lower shelf, was a happy individual indulging in all the variations of a nervous treble of every possible pitch:  his was an inconstant falsetto in sound and cadence.  Above him snored one as if he had a metallic reed in his larynx that opened with each inhalation:  his snore struck me as a brassy alto.  The tenors were distributed