chewing or smoking, and sometimes chewing and smoking together. I
have never seen tobacco so sillily abused. Shakespeare bought a
tin washing-dish, Dubuque a towel, and Pennsylvania a brick of
soap. The partners used these instruments, one after another,
according to the order of their first awaking; and when the firm
had finished there was no want of borrowers. Each filled the tin
dish at the water filter opposite the stove, and retired with the
whole stock in trade to the platform of the car. There he knelt
down, supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or one
elbow crooked about the railing, and made a shift to wash his face
and neck and hands; a cold, an insufficient, and, if the train is
moving rapidly, a somewhat dangerous toilet.

On a similar division of expense, the firm of Pennsylvania,
Shakespeare, and Dubuque supplied themselves with coffee, sugar,
and necessary vessels; and their operations are a type of what went
on through all the cars. Before the sun was up the stove would be
brightly burning; at the first station the natives would come on
board with milk and eggs and coffee cakes; and soon from end to end
the car would be filled with little parties breakfasting upon the
bed-boards. It was the pleasantest hour of the day.

There were meals to be had, however, by the wayside: a breakfast
in the morning, a dinner somewhere between eleven and two, and
supper from five to eight or nine at night. We had rarely less
than twenty minutes for each; and if we had not spent many another
twenty minutes waiting for some express upon a side track among
miles of desert, we might have taken an hour to each repast and
arrived at San Francisco up to time. For haste is not the foible
of an emigrant train. It gets through on sufferance, running the