Note.--Our readers--our numerous readers--who live in Equatorial Africa,
may read this under the title “In Dry Timbucto”; those who live in
Central America will kindly call it “In Dry Tehauntepec.”
It may have been, for aught I know, the change from a wet to a dry
atmosphere. I am told that, biologically, such things profoundly affect
the human system.
At any rate I found it impossible that night--I was on the train from
Montreal to Toronto--to fall asleep.
A peculiar wakefulness seemed to have seized upon me, which appeared,
moreover, to afflict the other passengers as well. In the darkness of
the car I could distinctly hear them groaning at intervals.
“Are they ill?” I asked, through the curtains, of the porter as he
passed.
“No, sir,” he said, “they’re not ill. Those is the Toronto passengers.”
“All in this car?” I asked.
“All except that gen’lman you may have heard singing in the smoking
compartment. He’s booked through to Chicago.”
But, as is usual in such cases, sleep came at last with unusual
heaviness. I seemed obliterated from the world till, all of a sudden, I
found myself, as it were, up and dressed and seated in the observation
car at the back of the train, awaiting my arrival.
“Is this Toronto?” I asked of the Pullman conductor, as I peered through
the window of the car.
The conductor rubbed the pane with his finger and looked out.
“I think so,” he said.
“Do we stop here?” I asked.
“I think we do this morning,” he answered. “I think I heard the
conductor say that they have a lot of milk cans to put off here this
morning. I’ll just go and find out, sir.”
“Stop here!” broke in an irascible-looking gentleman in a grey tweed
suit who was sitting in the next chair to mine. “Do they _stop_ here?
I should say they did indeed. Don’t you know,” he added, turning to the
Pullman conductor, “that any train is _compelled_ to stop here. There’s
a by-law, a municipal by-law of the City of Toronto, _compelling_ every
train to stop?”
“I didn’t know it,” said the conductor humbly.
“Do you mean to say,” continued the irascible gentleman, “that you have
never read the by-laws of the City of Toronto?”
“No, sir,” said the conductor.
“The ignorance of these fellows,” said the man in grey tweed, swinging
his chair round again towards me. “We ought to have a by-law to compel
them to read the by-laws. I must start an agitation for it at once.”
Here he took out a little red notebook and wrote something in it,
murmuring, “We need a new agitation anyway.”
Presently he shut the book up with a snap. I noticed that there was a
sort of peculiar alacrity in everything he did.
“You, sir,” he said, “have, of course, read our municipal by-laws?”
“Oh, yes,” I answered. “Splendid, aren’t they? They read like a
romance.”
“You are most flattering to our city,” said the irascible gentleman with
a bow. “Yet you, sir, I take it, are not from Toronto.”
“No,” I answered, as humbly as I could. “I’m from Montreal.”
“Ah!” said the gentleman, as he sat back and took a thorough look at me.
“From Montreal? Are you drunk?”
“No,” I replied. “I don’t think so.”
“But you are _suffering_ for a drink,” said my new acquaintance eagerly.
“You need it, eh? You feel already a kind of craving, eh what?”
“No,” I answered. “The fact is it’s rather early in the morning--”
“Quite so,” broke in the irascible gentleman, “but I understand that in
Montreal all the saloons are open at seven, and even at that hour are
crowded, sir, crowded.”