And before the lady had recovered from her astonishment he dived into his red bag, produced an extensive brief, and reads as follows:—
“It may seem hard to a man who has lost his ticket, or perhaps had it stolen from him, that he should have to pay his fare a second time; but it is better and more reasonable that a passenger should now and then have to suffer the consequences of his own want of care, than that a system (the system of issuing tickets as now in vogue) should be rendered impracticable, which seems necessary to the transaction of this important branch of business. It is not for the sole advantage, or the pleasure and caprice of the railway company that these things are done in such a hurry. The public, whether wisely or not, desire to travel at the rate of four or five hundred miles a day, and that rapidity of movement cannot be accomplished without peculiar arrangements to suit the exigency which must be found sometimes to produce inconvenience. If the passenger in this case, who I have no doubt lost her ticket, could claim as a matter of right to have it believed on her word that she had paid her passage, everybody else in a similar case must have the same right to tell the same story and to be carried through without paying the conductor, and without showing to him a proof that he had paid any one.”[346]
“But,” said the lady, who during the delivery of the judgment had time to recover her senses and her ticket, “but my friend here could vouch for me that I spoke the truth.”
“Ah, my dear madam, do not deceive yourself; reflect that in Massachusetts it was decided that if carriers require passengers to buy tickets before going on board, and to deliver them up on going off, and the passenger loses his ticket, he must on landing pay again;[347] and in Curtis v. G. T. R. Co.,[348] that ornament of the Canadian bench, Draper, C. J., remarked that he supposed that a man who produced no ticket, but asserted that he had paid his fare and had lost his ticket and therefore declined to pay again, would—though a by-stander corroborated the assertion—be deemed refusing to pay, within the meaning of the Acts.”
“I do not see what the Acts have to do with it. I never saw anything about such things in the Acts,” said the lady, getting rather puzzled over the matter.
“What, madam, do you read such things? I should have imagined that a fair creature like yourself would have found them too dry to read.”
“No sir; I am a member of the association of the Church of the New Jerusalem, and I read the Acts of the Apostles as well as every other part of the Bible,” eagerly responded the lady.
Amid broad smiles, giggling he-hes, hearty ha-has, guffawing ho-hos, the Q. C. hastened to explain.
“Oh, my dear madam, I meant no allusion to Holy Writ; I meant 31 Vic., chapter 68, commonly called the Railway Act of 1868, which says at section 20: ‘Any passenger refusing to pay the fare, may by the conductor of the train and the servants the company be put off the cars, with his luggage, at any usual stopping-place, or near any dwelling-house, as the conductor elects, the conductor first stopping the train and using no unnecessary force.’”