By a mutual compact, we talked little in the cars.  A communicative friend is the greatest nuisance to have at one’s side during a railroad journey, especially if his conversation is stimulating and in itself agreeable.  “A fast train and a ‘slow’ neighbor,” is my motto.  Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful reverie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging themselves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of sand in Chladni’s famous experiment,—­fresh ideas coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a measure of corn is jolted in a farmer’s wagon,—­all this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them wound up,—­many times, I say, just as my brain was beginning to creep and hum with this delicious locomotive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down by me and opened a conversation which has broken my day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when they should have been filling themselves full of fresh juices.  My friends spared me this trial.

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight tipsiness produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, which I take to be the exhilarating stage of that condition which reaches hopeless inebriety in what we know as sea-sickness.  Where the horizon opened widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the rapid movement of near objects contrasted with the slow motion of distant ones.  Looking from a right-hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide swiftly backward, or to the right, while the distant hills not only do not appear to move backward, but look by contrast with the fences near at hand as if they were moving forward, or to the left; and thus the whole landscape becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an imaginary axis somewhere in the middle-distance.

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best-known and longest-established of the New-York caravansaries, and I accompanied them.  We were particularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated.  The traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melancholy experience of Shenstone, and have to sigh over the reflection that he has found “his warmest welcome at an inn,” has something to learn at the offices of the great city hotels.  The unheralded guest who is honored by mere indifference may think himself blessed with singular good-fortune.  If the despot of the Patent-Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor.  The coldest welcome that a threadbare