It is this reasonable and moderate temper that makes the commuter the seed wherewith a new generation shall be disseminated.  He faces troubles manifold without embittered grumbling.  His is a new kind of Puritanism, which endures hardship without dourness.  When, on Christmas Eve, the train out of Jamaica was so packed that the aisle was one long mass of unwillingly embraced passengers, and even the car platforms were crowded with shivering wights, and the conductor buffeted his way as best he could over our toes and our parcels of tinsel balls, what was the general cry?  Was it a yell against the railroad for not adding an extra brace of cars?  No, it was good-natured banter of the perspiring little officer as he struggled to disentangle himself from forests of wedged legs.  “You’ve got a fine, big family in here,” they told him:  “you ought to be proud of us.”  And there was a sorrowing Italian who had with him a string of seven children who had tunnelled and burrowed their way down the packed aisle of the smoking car and had got irretrievably scattered.  The father was distracted.  Here and there, down the length of the car, someone would discover an urchin and hold him up for inspection.  “Is this one of them?” he would cry, and Italy would give assent.  “Right!” And the children were agglomerated and piled in a heap in the middle of the car until such time as a thinning of the crowd permitted the anxious and blushing sire to reassemble them and reprove their truancy with Adriatic lightnings from his dark glowing eyes.

How pleasing is our commuter’s simplicity!  A cage of white mice, or a crated goat (such are to be seen now and then on the Jamaica platform) will engage his eye and give him keen amusement.  Then there is that game always known (in the smoking car) as “pea-knuckle.”  The sight of four men playing will afford contemplative and apparently intense satisfaction to all near.  They will lean diligently over seat-backs to watch every play of the cards.  They will stand in the aisle to follow the game, with apparent comprehension.  Then there are distinguished figures that move through the observant commuter’s peep-show.  There is the tall young man with the beaky nose, which (as Herrick said)

          Is the grace
          And proscenium of his face.

He is one of several light-hearted and carefree gentry who always sit together and are full of superb cheer.  Those who travel sometimes with twinges of perplexity or skepticism are healed when they see the magnificent assurance of this creature.  Every day we hear him making dates for his cronies to meet him at lunch time, and in the evening we see him towering above the throng at the gate.  We like his confident air toward life, though he is still a little too jocular to be a typical commuter.