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Now, that I am in a bad humor, let me touch on another grievance. I
declare to you that something ought to be done about tomato cans--a
law forbidding women to have or handle them. There now; don't fly off
and say I am attacking the gentler sex. I am not; I am attacking the
combination of the two. Take the gentler sex by themselves and they
are just lovely, but when they go in partnership with tomato cans they
are--well, I won't say anything rash. There is one thing, thank heaven;
I can keep my temper under all circumstances. Sitting in the cars the
other day, engaged wasting a whole day of my fourteen to go something
over a hundred miles, the new Floral Transfer Express came in sight.
It was a lady of middle age--I won't say how old, though I wouldn't
have forgiven her if she had been sixteen. Her arms were full of tomato
cans, containing slips of flowers, and it took the conductor and porter
both to hoist her up the car steps--for like all women, she would
rather be run over than let go her bundles. When she took her seat,
the cans were distributed on all the seats around her, two-thirds of
them exuding the water with which the flowers had been sprinkled while
she was waiting at the station. I got two or three of them as a
retribution, I presume, for my having kept her from falling over the
stove, and for my duplicity in saying that they would not be in the
way in the slightest. If I live I shall hereafter be a more truthful
man. I was kept busy just four hours balancing them so as to keep them
from being jarred from the seat by the motion of the car. But one ray
illuminated the scene, and that was, when returning from the water
cooler she sat down on a little nest of four of them. It looked like
a judgment and I believe it was. I don't mind the deadly traps women
set on window ledges, in the shape of tomato cans filled with flowers
to slip down on man's head, but I do insist that railroad authorities