The managers of railroads running west from Chicago pretty rigidly enforce a rule excluding from certain reserved cars all gentlemen travelling without ladies. As I do not smoke, I avoided the smoking cars; and as the ladies’ car was sometimes more select and always more comfortable than the other cars, I tried various expedients to smuggle myself in. If I saw a lady about to enter the car alone, I followed closely, hoping thus to elude the vigilance of the brakeman, who generally acted as door-keeper. But the car Cerberus is pretty well up to all such dodges, and I did not always succeed. On one occasion, seeing a young couple, evidently just married, and starting on a bridal tour, about to enter the car, I followed closely, but was stopped by the door-keeper, who called out:
“How many gentlemen are with this lady.”
I have always noticed that young newly-married people are very fond of saying “my husband” and “my wife;” they are new terms which sound pleasantly to the ears of those who utter them; so in answer to the peremptory inquiry of the door-keeper, the bridegroom promptly responded:
“And I guess you can see by the resemblance between the lady and myself,” said I to Cerberus, “that I am her father.”
The astounded husband and the blushing bride were too much “taken aback” to deny their newly-discovered parent, but the brakeman said, as he permitted the young couple to pass into the car:
“We can’t pass all creation with one lady.”
“I hope you will not deprive me of the company of my child during the little time we can remain together,” I said with a demure countenance. The brakeman evidently sympathized with the fond “parient” whose feelings were sufficiently lacerated at losing his daughter through her finding a husband, and I was permitted to pass. I immediately apologized to the young bride and her husband, and told them who I was, and my reasons for the assumed paternity, and they enjoyed the joke so heartily that they called me “father” during our entire journey together. Indeed, the husband privately and slyly hinted to me that the first boy should be christened “P. T.” My friend the Rev. Dr. Chapin, by the by an inveterate punster, is never tired of ringing the changes on the names in my family; he says that my wife and I are the most sympathetic couple he ever saw, since she is “Charity” and I am “Pity” (P. T.) On one occasion, at my house in New York, he called my attention to the monogram, P. T. B., on the door and said, “I did it,” “Did what,” I asked: “Why that,” replied the doctor, “P. T. B.,—Pull The Bell, of course,” thus literally ringing a new change on my initials.
At another time during my western lecturing trip, I was following closely in the wake of a lady who was entering the favorite car, when the brakeman exclaimed; “You can’t go in there, sir!”
“I rather guess I can go in with a lady,” said I, pointing to the one who had just entered.