[CHAPTER V]
The Joys of Third-Class Travel
IN Ireland, if you wish to travel third class, it is well to get into a carriage marked "non smoking." If there is no sign on it it is a smoking compartment, quite probably, the custom here being often the direct opposite of that in Great Britain.
If you are traveling with women in the party the second class is advisable, but the third has this advantage—it saves you money that you can spend on worthless trinkets that may be confiscated by our customs house officers.
I have been ten days in the north of Ireland and I met my first drunken man in a third-class carriage.
Will the W. C. T. U. kindly make a note of this? Allow me to repeat for the benefit of those who took up the paper after I had begun—I have been ten days in Ireland and have traveled afoot, acar, and on train and tram through half a dozen northern counties and have been on the outlook for picturesque sights, and I saw my first drunken man yesterday afternoon—the afternoon of the tenth day.
He was in a third-class smoking compartment, and in my hurry to make my train I stepped in without noticing the absence of the sign.
He was a very old and rather nice-looking, clean-shaven man, and his instincts were for the most part of the kindliest, but he would have irritated Charles Dickens exceedingly, for he was an inveterate spitter, of wonderful aim, and, like the beautiful lady in the vaudeville shows whose husband surrounds her with knives without once touching her, I was surrounded but unharmed. When the old man saw my straw hat a gleam of interest came into his dull eye, and he came over and sat down right opposite me.