From Pillar to Post: Leaves from a Lecturer's Note-Book

by John Kendrick Bangs

On returning to my place in the sleeper I noticed in the section directly across the aisle a handsome Englishwoman, traveling with no other companion than a little daughter, a child of about three and a half years of happy, bubbling youth. The little one was seated on her mother's lap, and was enjoying a "let's pretend" drive across country, using the maternal lorgnette chain in lieu of the ribbons wherewith to guide her imaginary steeds.

An hour passed, when a boisterous laugh from the rear of the car indicated the approach of the three barbarians of the smoker, who to my disgust a moment later settled themselves in the section directly in front of mine, and to my dismay began apparently to take a greater interest in the lady across the aisle than the ordinary usages of polite human intercourse warranted, lacking a formal introduction.

I have never posed as a Squire of Dames, and I have a wholesome distaste for such troubles as an unseeing eye enables a man to avoid; but the intrusion of these Goths, not to say Vandals, upon the lady's right to travel unmolested was so obvious that I couldn't help seeing and inwardly resenting it. The woman herself treated the situation with becoming coolness and dignity, showing only by a slight change of color, and now and then a vexed biting of the lips, that she noticed it at all; but the cooler she became the more strenuous became the efforts of the barbarians to "scrape an acquaintance."

I held an inward debate with myself as to my duty in the premises. I did not care to get into a row; but the ogling soon became so pronounced that it really seemed necessary to interfere. I reached out my hand to ring for such reinforcements as the porter and the conductor might be able to bring to our assistance, when to my astonishment the worst offender of the three rose from his seat, and stepped quickly to the lady's side—and then there was revealed to me the marvelous wisdom of the old injunction, "Judge not, that ye be not judged"; for the supposed ruffian, whom I would a moment before have willingly, and with seeming justification, thrown bodily from the train, with the manner of a Chesterfield in the rough lifted his hat and spoke.

"You will excuse me for speaking to you, ma'am," he said, and there was a wistful smile on his lips and a tenderness in his eye worthy of a seemingly better cause, "but I'm—I'm what they call a drummer, a traveling man, and I've been away from home for three months. I've got a little girl of my own at home about the same age as this kid of yours, and I tell you, ma'am, you'd ease off an awful case of homesickness if you'd let me play with the little lady just for a few minutes."

The mother's heart seemed to go right out to him, as did mine also. She smiled graciously, and handed over her little daughter to the tender mercies of that group whose presence I had fled only a short while before—and for the rest of the afternoon that Pullman sleeper was transformed into a particularly bright and joyous nursery that echoed and reëchoed to the merry laughter of happy childhood.

If there is an animal of any kind in the zoos of commerce that those men did not impersonate during the next two or three hours I do not know its name, the especially objectionable barbarian transforming himself instantly on demand into an elephant, a yak, a roaring lion, a tiger, or a leopard changing its spots as actively as a flea, and all with a graceful facility that Proteus himself might well have envied. And later, when night fell, and weariness came with it, in the dusk of the twilight it was indeed a pretty sight to me, and a sight that smote somewhat upon my conscience for my over-ready contempt of the earlier afternoon, when my gaze fell upon the figure of an exhausted drummer, his eyes half-closed, sleepily humming a tender lullaby to a tired little golden-haired stranger who lay cuddled up in his arms, fast asleep, with her head upon his breast.

"It was indeed a pretty sight to me!"

I like to think that that little incident was a valuable contribution to my education in the science of brotherhood. It has not perhaps produced in my soul a larger tolerance of the intolerable in casual conversation, but it has served to warn me against the dangers of snap judgments, and has certainly broadened my sympathies in respect to my fellow man in my chance meetings with him upon the highways and byways of life, whence sometimes, in the loneliness of my wanderings, I have gathered much comfort, and reaped harvests in friendliness which otherwise I might have lost.