and he cannot cure his cough because the bottle of glycerine and wild cherry provided for just such an emergency by the loved ones at home, got broken on the trip from Jacksonville to Montgomery, and went dribbling down through the trunk, ruining his reference books, three of his best shirts, and the only decent pair of russet shoes he had left.  The other shoes have been ruined in various ways; one pair was spoiled in a possum hunt at Clinton, North Carolina—­and it was worth it, and worth the overcoat that was ruined at the same time; two pairs of black shoes have been caked up with layers and layers of sticky blacking, and one pair of russets was ruined by a well intentioned negro lad in Memphis, who thought they would look better painted red.  His traveler’s checks are running low and he is continually afraid that, amid his constantly increasing piles of notes and papers, he will lose the three books in each of which remains a few feet of “yellow scrip”—­the mileage of the South—­which will take him on his return journey as far as Washington.

Nor is that all.  The determining factor in his decision to go home lies in the havoc wrought by a long succession of hotel laundries—­laundries which starch the bosoms of soft silk shirts, which mark the owner’s name in ink upon the hems of sheer linen handkerchiefs which already have embroidered monograms, which rip holes in those handkerchiefs and then fold them so that the holes are concealed until, some night, he whips one confidently from the pocket of his dress suit, and reveals it looking like a tattered battle-flag; laundries which leave long trails of iron rust on shirt-bosoms, which rip out seams, tear off buttons, squeeze out new standing collars to a saw-tooth edge, iron little pieces of red and brown string into collars, cuffs, and especially into the bosoms of dress shirts, and “finish” dress shirts and collars, not only in the sense of ending their days of usefulness as fast as possible, but also by making them shine like the interiors of glazed porcelain bathtubs.  But the greatest cruelty of the hotel laundry is to socks.  It is not that they do more damage to socks, than to other garments, but that the laundry devil has been able to think of a greater variety of means for the destruction of socks than for the destruction of any other kind of garment.  He begins by fastening to each sock a cloth-covered tin tag, attached by means of prongs.  On this tag he puts certain marks which will mean nothing to the next laundry.  The next laundry therefore attaches other tin tags, either ripping off the old ones (leaving holes where the prongs went through) or else letting them remain in place, so that, after a while, the whole top of the sock is covered with tin, making it an extraordinarily uncomfortable thing to wear, and a strange thing to look at.  There is still another way in which the laundry devil tortures the sock-owner.  He can find ways to shrink any sock that is not made of solid heavy silk; and