Part 33 (2/2)

_(Saturday Evening Post)_

Two half-tone reproductions of wash-drawings by a staff artist

YOUR PORTER

BY EDWARD HUNGERFORD

He stands there at the door of his car, dusky, grinning, i your pleasure He steps forward as you near hi experience and careful training, inquires:

”What space you got, guv'nor?”

”Lower five,” you reply ”Are you full-up, George?”

”Jus' toler'bul, guv'nor”

He has your grips, is already slipping down the aisle toward section five And, after he has stowed the big one under the facing bench and placed the sain:

”Shake out a pillow for you, guv'nor?”

That ”guv'nor,” though not a part of his official training, is a part of his unofficial--his subtlety, if you please Another passenger e” But there can be no other guv'nor save you on this car and trip And George, of the Pullht as a ht watch over her solitary chick The car is well filled and he is going to have a hard night of it; but he is going to take good care of you He tells you so; and, before you are off the car, you are going to have good reason to believe it

Before we consider the sable-skinned George of to-day, give a passing thought to the Pulle M Pullrated froe out into Illinois ave birth to the idea of railroad luxury at half a cent acars before Pullman built the Pioneer, as he called his h bunks for the coers, on the cu about 1840

Other early railroads had made similar experiments, but they were allcar that would coree of luxury The Pioneer, viewed in the eyes of 1864, was really a luxurious car It was as wide as the sleeping car of to-day and nearly as high; in fact, so high and so as it that there were no railroads on which it ht run, and when Pullman pleaded with the old-time railroad officers to widen the clearances, so as to perhed at him

”It is ridiculous, Mr Pullly in refusal

”People are never going to pay their good money to ride in any such fancy contraption as that car of yours”

Then suddenly they ceased sraph was sobering an exultant land by telling how its great ton And h to carry the body of Abrahafield Suddenly soht of the Pioneer, which rested, a virtual prisoner, in a railroad yard not far froo

The Pioneer was quickly released There was no hesitation now about ht, station platfor cut away, and the first of all the Pullh ain to Illinois Abrahao this blossoiven birth to the Pullman idea The other day, while one of the brisk Federal co consideration to the Pulle, it called to the witness stand the executive head of the Pullman Company And the man who answered the call was Robert T Lincoln, the son of Abrahanated it A, little dreah cars to exhaust the letters of the alphabet To-day the Pullman Company has more than six thousand cars in constant use It operates the entire sleeping-car service and by far the larger part of the parlor-car service on all but half a dozen of the railroads of the United States and Canada, with a goodly sprinkling of routes south into Mexico On an average night sixty thousand persons--a community equal in size to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or South Bend, Indiana--sleep within its cars

And one of the chief excuses for its existence is the flexibility of its service A railroad in the South, with a large passenger traffic in the winter, or a railroad in the North, with conditions reversed and travel running at high tide throughout the hot summer months, could hardly afford to place the investh-tide needs, and have those cars grow rusty throughout the long, dullits extra cars backward and forward over the face of the land in regi money It reat fleet of traveling hotels

Last suhts Templars held their convention in Denver, it sent four hundred and fifty extra cars out to the capital of Colorado And this year it is bending its resources toward finding sufficient cars tooverland trek to the expositions on the Pacific Coast

The transition fro car of today was not accole step A man does not have to be so very old or so very much traveled to recall the day when the Pull best to justify that title It was alured by all rilles and dinky plush curtains--head-buy, as well as one of the very foundations of the newspaper school of humor