A tip is not necessarily a humiliation, either to the giver or to the taker.  On the contrary, it is a token of meritorious service.  And the smart porter is going to take good care that he gives such service.  But how about the porter who is not so smart—­the man who has the lean run?  As every butcher and every transportation man knows, there is lean with the fat.  And it does the lean man little good to know that his fat brother is preparing to buy a secondhand automobile.  On the contrary, it creates an anarchist—­or at least a socialist—­down under that black skin.

Here is Lemuel—­cursed with a lean run and yet trying to maintain at least an appearance of geniality.  Lemuel runs on a “differential” between New York, Chicago and St. Louis.  Every passenger-traffic man knows that most of the differentials—­as the roads that take longer hours, and so are permitted to charge a slightly lower through fare between those cities, are called—­have had a hard time of it in recent years.  It is the excess-fare trains, the highest-priced carriers—­which charge you a premium of a dollar for every hour they save in placing you in the terminal—­that are the crowded trains.  And the differentials have had increasing difficulty getting through passengers.

It seems that in this day and land a man who goes from New York to Chicago or St. Louis is generally so well paid as to make it worth dollars to him to save hours in the journey.  It is modern efficiency showing itself in railroad-passenger travel.  But the differentials, having local territory to serve, as well as on account of some other reasons, must maintain a sleeping-car service—­even at a loss.  There is little or no loss to the Pullman Company—­you may be sure of that!  The railroad pays it a mileage fee for hauling a half or three-quarter empty car over its own line—­in addition to permitting the Pullman system to take all the revenue from the car; but Lemuel sees his end of the business as a dead loss.

He leaves New York at two-thirty o’clock on Monday afternoon, having reported at his car nearly three hours before so as to make sure that it is properly stocked and cleaned for its long trip.  He is due at St. Louis at ten-fifteen on Tuesday evening—­though it will be nearly two hours later before he has checked the contents of the car and slipped off to the bunking quarters maintained there by his company.

On Wednesday evening at seven o’clock he starts east and is due in New York about dawn on Friday morning.  He cleans up his car and himself, and gets to his little home on the West Side of Manhattan Island sometime before noon; but by noon on Saturday he must be back at his car, making sure that it is fit and ready by two-thirty o’clock—­the moment the conductor’s arm falls—­and they are headed west again.

This time the destination is Chicago, which is not reached until about six o’clock Sunday night.  He bunks that night in the Windy City and then spends thirty-two hours going back again to New York.  He sees his home one more night; then he is off to St. Louis again—­started on a fresh round of his eternal schedule.