That “guv’nor,” though not a part of his official training, is a part of his unofficial—­his subtlety, if you please.  Another passenger might be the “kunnel”; still another, the “jedge.”  But there can be no other guv’nor save you on this car and trip.  And George, of the Pullmans, is going to watch over you this night as a mother hen might watch over her solitary chick.  The car is well filled and he is going to have a hard night of it; but he is going to take good care of you.  He tells you so; and, before you are off the car, you are going to have good reason to believe it.

Before we consider the sable-skinned George of to-day, give a passing thought to the Pullman itself.  The first George of the Pullmans—­George M. Pullman—­was a shrewd-headed carpenter who migrated from a western New York village out into Illinois more than half a century ago and gave birth to the idea of railroad luxury at half a cent a mile.  There had been sleeping cars before Pullman built the Pioneer, as he called his maiden effort.  There was a night car, equipped with rough bunks for the comfort of passengers, on the Cumberland Valley Railroad along about 1840.

Other early railroads had made similar experiments, but they were all makeshifts and crude.  Pullman set out to build a sleeping car that would combine a degree of comfort with a degree of luxury.  The Pioneer, viewed in the eyes of 1864, was really a luxurious car.  It was as wide as the sleeping car of to-day and nearly as high; in fact, so high and so wide was it that there were no railroads on which it might run, and when Pullman pleaded with the old-time railroad officers to widen the clearances, so as to permit the Pioneer to run over their lines, they laughed at him.

“It is ridiculous, Mr. Pullman,” they told him smilingly in refusal.  “People are never going to pay their good money to ride in any such fancy contraption as that car of yours.”

Then suddenly they ceased smiling.  All America ceased smiling.  Morse’s telegraph was sobering an exultant land by telling how its great magistrate lay dead within the White House, at Washington.  And men were demanding a funeral car, dignified and handsome enough to carry the body of Abraham Lincoln from Washington to Springfield.  Suddenly somebody thought of the Pioneer, which rested, a virtual prisoner, in a railroad yard not far from Chicago.

The Pioneer was quickly released.  There was no hesitation now about making clearances for her.  Almost in the passing of a night, station platforms and other obstructions were being cut away, and the first of all the Pullman cars made a triumphant though melancholy journey to New York, to Washington, and back again to Illinois.  Abraham Lincoln, in the hour of death—­fifty years ago this blossoming spring of 1915—­had given birth to the Pullman idea.  The other day, while one of the brisk Federal commissions down at Washington was extending consideration to the Pullman porter and his wage, it called to the witness stand the executive head of the Pullman Company.  And the man who answered the call was Robert T. Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln.