car? Through the crowd my Parisian lunch-basket came mincing up to me, still ready for perpetual picnic. Silly chit! I wouldn’t travel with her. My Rotterdam purchase, bulging and redolent with cheeses, came waddling up, respectable perhaps, but with it I should have been as conspicuous as with one of the Marken imps in copious trousers that it so much resembled. My former pride of Scotch travel was now so fallen away that he looked as if he were in the last stages of his native whiskey, and as if his physique would hardly have supported the weight of a hairpin. No help to be had in him! My American suitcase, in May so trig and debonair, had been punched and pounded out of all semblance to anything belonging either to America or a suitcase. My British cake-box had suffered likewise, and in its decrepitude supported the loss of a lock, and appeared to my horrified eyes carefully roped with clothesline by a friendly steward. Even though I promptly sat down upon it, spreading my Paris skirt wide, I could not conceal that yellow cake-box from the fashionable steamer folk that swarmed about me. Suitcase and tin trunk both had lost all distinction of nation; they both belonged now to the international species, tramp. There remained to me only my evil genius, the orange-tawny telescope. Foreign labels had but scantily subdued the natural aggressiveness of his demeanor. He was possible—perhaps. Then I considered how he had flouted me, scorned me, spilled out at me, jeered at me in my helplessness. I pictured opening and shutting him in the berth of a sleeping car; then quietly, inconspicuously, and virulently, I kicked him.