you?" asks your friend.

"No! Do you think I'm a fool?" you answer, irritably. "What should
I want to do that for?"

On going systematically over yourself for about the twentieth time,
you discover it in your waistcoat pocket, and for the next half-hour
you sit and wonder how you came to miss it on the previous nineteen
occasions.

Meanwhile, during this trying scene, the conduct of the guard has
certainly not tended to allay your anxiety and nervousness. All the
time that you have been looking for your ticket, he has been doing
silly tricks on the step outside, imperilling his life by every
means that experience and ingenuity can suggest.

The train is going at the rate of thirty miles an hour, the express
speed in Germany, and a bridge comes in sight crossing over the
line. On seeing this bridge, the guard, holding on by the window,
leans his body as far back as ever it will go. You look at him, and
then at the rapidly-nearing bridge, and calculate that the arch will
just take his head off without injuring any other part of him
whatever, and you wonder whether the head will be jerked into the
carriage or will fall outside.

When he is three inches off the bridge, he pulls himself up
straight, and the brickwork, as the train dashes through, kills a
fly that was trespassing on the upper part of his right ear.

Then, when the bridge is passed, and the train is skirting the very