"Thank you, General," said I, as he returned with the desired article.
"Glad to serve yo', Admiral," said he with deep gravity.
"And now, Bishop," said I, resolved to keep at it until I scored a victory, "suppose—"
"Hol' on, mistuh!" he retorted instantly. "Hol' on! Dey ain't mo'n one puhson in de Universe whut's higher 'n a bishop, an' I knows mighty well yo' ain't Him!"
Our dusky brothers not infrequently fill me with a sense of consolation in difficult moments. Two such cases occur to me at this writing; one in my own experience, and the other in a story I heard in the South last winter, the mere thought of which has many times since served to soften my woes in troublesome moments.
The first occurred several years ago, when the steel passenger cars first came into commission. Being myself of a somewhat inflammable nature, I make it a rule to travel on these in preference to the old-fashioned tinder boxes of ten years ago whenever I can. On this particular occasion, however, on a hurried midwinter night run, I found myself in a highly ornate, lumbering Pullman of the vintage of '68. It was an essentially mid-Victorian affair, and in the matter of decoration was a flamboyant specimen of the early A. T. Stewart period of American interior embellishment.
Those whose memories hark back that far will remember that the Pullman Company's money at that time was largely expended on lavish ornamentation of a peculiarly assertive rococo style, consisting for the main part of an eruption of gew-gaws which ran riot over the exposed surfaces of the car like a rash on the back of a baby. The external slant of the upper berth in these cars was ever a favorite surface for this particular kind of gew-gawsity, and no occupant of a lower berth known to me ever succeeded in getting safely into bed, or out of it, without having one or more of these lovely patterns imprinted on the top of his head with more force than delicacy. In collisions the occupant of one of these varnish-soaked orgies of fretwork had about as much chance of escaping unscathed as what a dear clerical friend of mine in a lay sermon once characterized as "a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through the depths of purgatory." Whenever I find myself on one of these cars I think instinctively of just three things, and in this order—my past life, my possible permanent future, and my accident insurance policy—and try to comfort myself by playing both ends against the middle.
In my haste on this occasion I had not particularly noticed the characteristics of the car until I attempted to remove my shoes to retire. As I sat up after untying the laces I was brought to a painful realization of the old-time nature of the vehicle by having impressed most forcibly upon the top of my head the convolutions of an empire wreath, carved out of pine splints, and embossed with gold leaf, which served to give Napoleonic dignity to the upper berth when not in use. The jar, plus the ensuing association of ideas, brought to my mind an uneasy realization of the probable truth that the car was of antique pattern, about as solid as any other box of potential toothpicks, and as fireproof as a ball of excelsior soaked with paraffin. At the moment the porter happened to be passing with the carpet-stepped ladder to assist a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound traveling man into the berth overhead, and I addressed him.
"See here, porter!" said I. "What kind of car do you call this, anyhow? Isn't this the car Shem, Ham, and Japhet took when they moved back to town from Ararat?"
"Yas, suh," he answered. "She suttinly am an ol' timah, suh."