The result of this little adventure was that Philip did not reach Ilium till daylight the next morning, when he descended sleepy and sore, from a way train, and looked about him.  Ilium was in a narrow mountain gorge, through which a rapid stream ran.  It consisted of the plank platform on which he stood, a wooden house, half painted, with a dirty piazza (unroofed) in front, and a sign board hung on a slanting pole—­bearing the legend, “Hotel.  P. Dusenheimer,” a sawmill further down the stream, a blacksmith-shop, and a store, and three or four unpainted dwellings of the slab variety.

As Philip approached the hotel he saw what appeared to be a wild beast crouching on the piazza.  It did not stir, however, and he soon found that it was only a stuffed skin.  This cheerful invitation to the tavern was the remains of a huge panther which had been killed in the region a few weeks before.  Philip examined his ugly visage and strong crooked fore-arm, as he was waiting admittance, having pounded upon the door.

“Yait a bit.  I’ll shoost—­put on my trowsers,” shouted a voice from the window, and the door was soon opened by the yawning landlord.

“Morgen!  Didn’t hear d’ drain oncet.  Dem boys geeps me up zo spate.  Gom right in.”

Philip was shown into a dirty bar-room.  It was a small room, with a stove in the middle, set in a long shallow box of sand, for the benefit of the “spitters,” a bar across one end—­a mere counter with a sliding glass-case behind it containing a few bottles having ambitious labels, and a wash-sink in one corner.  On the walls were the bright yellow and black handbills of a traveling circus, with pictures of acrobats in human pyramids, horses flying in long leaps through the air, and sylph-like women in a paradisaic costume, balancing themselves upon the tips of their toes on the bare backs of frantic and plunging steeds, and kissing their hands to the spectators meanwhile.

As Philip did not desire a room at that hour, he was invited to wash himself at the nasty sink, a feat somewhat easier than drying his face, for the towel that hung in a roller over the sink was evidently as much a fixture as the sink itself, and belonged, like the suspended brush and comb, to the traveling public.  Philip managed to complete his toilet by the use of his pocket-handkerchief, and declining the hospitality of the landlord, implied in the remark, “You won’d dake notin’?” he went into the open air to wait for breakfast.

The country he saw was wild but not picturesque.  The mountain before him might be eight hundred feet high, and was only a portion of a long unbroken range, savagely wooded, which followed the stream.  Behind the hotel, and across the brawling brook, was another level-topped, wooded range exactly like it.  Ilium itself, seen at a glance, was old enough to be dilapidated, and if it had gained anything by being made a wood and water station of the new railroad,