at the other end.  Nor do I favour the method invariably adopted by people in cinema plays, which is to sit on the buffers or the roofs, or conceal yourself among the brakes or whatever they are underneath the carriages.  Unless you drop off just before the terminus, which hurts, the same objection arises as in the under-the-seat method; and in any case you are practically certain to be spotted not only by the officials of the railway company concerned but with axle-grease.

It is of course possible to travel without concealment and without a ticket either, merely discovering with a start of surprise when you are asked for it that you have lost the beastly thing.  But this involves acting.  It involves hunting with a great appearance of energy and haste in all your pockets, your reticule, your hatband, the turn-ups of your trousers, The Rescue (for you certainly used something as a book-marker) and finally turning out in front of all the other passengers the whole of your note-case, which proves that you cannot have been going to stay at the “Magnificent” after all, and the envelopes of all the old letters which you were taking down to the sea in the hopes of answering them there; and even after that you have to give the name and address of somebody you don’t like (say Sir ERIC GEDDES) to satisfy the inspector.

On the whole I think the best way is the one which I mean to adopt myself at the earliest opportunity.  Let us suppose that you are going to Brighton.  At Victoria Station you will purchase (1) a return ticket to Streatham Common, (2) a platform ticket.  The platform ticket entitles you to walk on to the platform from which the Brighton train starts, and, when it is just moving out and all the tickets have been looked at, you will leap on board.  This brings you to Brighton, and all you have to do there is to accost the man who takes the tickets in a voice hoarse with fury.  “Look here,” you will say, “I had an important business engagement at Streatham Common, worth thousands and thousands of pounds to me, and one of your fool porters told me a wrong platform at Victoria.  What are you going to do about it?” Now you might think that the porter would reply, “Come off it, Mister; you don’t kid me like that,” or make some other disappointing and impolite remark; but not a bit of it.  Bluster is the thing that pays.  First of all he will apologise, and then he will fetch the station-master, and he will apologise too, and after a bit they will offer you a special train back to Streatham Common, probably the one the KING uses when he goes to the seaside.  But you will of course refuse to be pacified and wave it away, saying, “Useless, absolutely useless.  Now that I am in this awful hole I shall spend the night here.  But I shall certainly sue your Company for the amount of the business that I have lost.”

That is what I mean to do, and with slight variations the ruse can be applied to almost any non-stop run.  Now that I have given the tip I shall hope to find quite a little crowd of disappointed business men round the station exits at holiday time when and/or if railway fares are increased.