To Panama and back

by Henry T. Byford

After our oyster supper my comrades started for Chicago via the Illinois Central Railway, and as I was committed to the Louisville and Nashville route, we parted company. My train was scheduled to start at 8 P. M., but a train which was to connect with us was indefinitely late, and as we could not safely go backward in the dark in search of it, we had to wait. Finally the expected happened, the loiterer arrived, and we started off at a soothing pace that put me to sleep. At home where I had a comfortable bed, a quiet room and everything my own way, I couldn’t go to sleep like that. In Chicago the pace is too fast. Fortunately I had taken the precaution to ask the porter to call me at six o’clock, that I might breakfast at a genuine U. S. hotel in Montgomery, where the train was to rest from seven to nine.

I awoke and turned over a few times in the course of the night, as one does on sleeping-car mattresses. I did it, however, just to feel how soft and comfortable the mattress was, and to congratulate myself. Any one who does not appreciate a sleeping-car mattress can learn to by taking passage in the S. S. Brighton. Let him ask the purser, steward or any of the officers of one of the small fruit boats about the Pullman mattress. Let him serve on one of them for two or three years and then try the Pullman bed. If I were a Carnegie, a Peter Cooper, or any other conscientious multi-millionaire, living or dead, I would create a fund with some of the money I couldn’t enjoy in Heaven or on earth, for the purpose of enabling all employees of fruit boats to live on land. Why do not the fruit-boatmen strike for better beds? Workmen on land strike for everything they want, and get it; and everybody tolerates the general inconvenience of it. We are all willing to help.

I noticed after two or three waking spells that the train was always stationary, but inferred that it was the stopping that disturbed and wakened me, for I was not accustomed to sleeping without noise and motion. After a time I became convinced that I could not go to sleep without their assistance, and waited impatiently for the train to begin its rumbling and bumping motion. As it did not start I concluded that it had stopped to take a long rest at Mobile, where it was due at 11:40 P. M., and that the time of day was therefore the middle of the night. I felt like blaming the Southern railroads for the way they allowed their express trains to lie around on side-tracks all along the line, waiting to miss connections, instead of hustling to make time and accommodate nervous people. I criticised them for their schedule habit of leaving New Orleans at 8 P. M. in order to loaf about Mobile and visit for two hours at Montgomery. My train could just as well have left at midnight and have given me an opportunity to go to the French opera with Doctor and Mrs. Palmer and have an oyster supper with them afterward, as to pretend to leave at eight, lie waiting for late trains until after nine, then shuffle off like a tramp-train and constantly wake me by standing still. A sleeping car should not try to imitate a bedroom in a country hotel.

I strove to become accustomed to the quiet and to will myself to sleep. I kept turning myself over like a pancake that must sooner or later get done. I turned on my side and tried to snore myself off. But snoring loves an audience, and I didn’t have any. It occurred to me that I was kept awake by the enjoyment of the to me unusual comfort of the bed, so I turned on my side and put my under arm behind me to keep myself from being too comfortable. When I couldn’t endure that position any longer I uncovered my head to be able to hear what was going on, and thus listen myself to sleep, but there were no noises. I threw down the cover and tried to keep cool, but the car was warm. I tried all of the stunts known to insomniacs, from complicated and inverted methods of counting to the solution of problems and the composition of scientific lectures, but they only made me hungry. Apparently I had not eaten oysters enough in New Orleans to last through the attack, so I ate two apples which I happened to have in my overcoat pocket. But eating never did agree with me, and I became more wide awake than ever. In bed I was no better off than an ordinary millionaire. His money could not buy Nature’s gift to the poor, and my science could not produce it. I knew that we were not lying at Montgomery or it would have been daylight and the porter would have called me. Hence I concluded that my arrival in the United States had brought back my old insomnia and that there was no remedy for it but expatriation or a sailor’s life.

Finally I became utterly discouraged at having lost almost an entire night’s rest, for I was too much of a veteran to expect any more sleep that night. So I sat up and pulled aside the window curtain to see if there were any signs of dawn. To my astonishment I let in bright sunlight. The window curtain had fitted so tightly in the window frame that the usual morning ray of light had not penetrated. I had mistaken the shimmer of light about the edges of the curtains for the night lights of the station. I rang for the porter and asked him why it was daylight.

“Dunno, sah,” he answered, “’cept it’s eight o’clock, and we’s waitin’ heah at Mobile foh a broken bridge to git mended.”

All of my insomnia had evidently been since about 6 A. M., and after eight hours of sleep, or two hours more than my average when I am sleeping well. I now knew that I had acquired the insomnia habit, and was destined to be a victim of insomnia no matter how well I slept. A bridge over which we were to pass was disabled, and by waiting until it was repaired, instead of going right along regardless, like a Northern express train, we missed a cold morning bath—being given no chance to choose between the bath and the extra nap. The train ahead of us had taken our bath. But like all dyspeptics who fret before arising, I felt consoled and cheerful after getting up and letting in the sunlight and realizing that the world was still getting on all right.

As the bridge could not be sufficiently repaired for traffic until noon, I concluded to make the best of the situation and hunt up a good cup of coffee. Mobile was the capital of the French possessions in America 200 years ago, long before old New Orleans was born. In the antebellum days Mobile was the hothouse of the Southern aristocracy and is now one of the richest towns in the old South in proportion to its population. I would find a good cup of café-au-lait in Mobile.

While I was making my toilet, a man of about seventy years, with scant white hair and delicate features, entered the dressing-room with a pint bottle of whiskey in his hand, and addressed me cordially.

“Have a drop, stranger?”