W. L. Alden

“ Well, in the first place it's always a big man, put together kind of loose and careless, that snores. Your small, tight-built nervous chap never snores. Now I'm a snorer myself, and I don't deny it. That's one of the reasons that I don't travel on a sleeping-car; but if I could reduce my weight by, say, eighty pounds, there wouldn't be any more snoring about me. ”

“ When a handsome young woman turned up and said she had come to teach school, everybody felt that she wasn't fit to grapple with the Athensville boys, who required an able-bodied man who could handle three or four of them at once if the occasion should arise. ”

“ I've seen a chap that persisted in snoring, dragged out of his berth and made to sit on the wood-box, with a man in front of him stirring him up with the poker every time he began to nod. The miners would take turns at this duty, and relieve each other every two hours, and the snorer wouldn't get a wink of sleep the whole time he was on that train. I've known of a man being kept awake in this way on a Central Pacific train all the way from 'Frisco to Chicago, and that was five days and nights at the time I'm speaking of. ”

“ Why, speaking of snoring, I've known lots of what you would call tragedies to happen in sleeping-cars on account of snoring. You don't hear of 'em in the papers, for the men that do these tragedies don't care to talk about 'em, and the company naturally wants the thing kept quiet. ”

“ Take 'em by and large, those miners were generally better behaved on the sleeping-car than the average commercial traveller is nowadays, for all that he gives such airs, and lets on to be at the top of Chicago society.
"There was one thing that the miners wouldn't stand, and that was snoring. They got the conductor to post up a notice in the sleeper, 'No Snoring Aloud,' and any man who wanted to snore after that was expected to do it so quiet that it wouldn't disturb anybody. If a man snored in a loud, tempestuous sort of way, he would be waked up and warned once. ”

“ You'll now point out the man you charge with snoring, and I'll tell you right here, that unless you prove your accusation that there man will take you out on the platform and hang you without any further nonsense.' 'I can't tell you the precise man who was snoring,' said the Jew, 'but I can show you the berth where the snoring came from. ”

“ The Jew, and she, and I had the sleeping-car to ourselves for the rest of the night, and when we got to Chicago, the miners sneaked out of the smoking-car on to the platform as if they had been caught picking pockets, and were afraid of the police.
"This story that I have been telling you goes to show that women can snore even when they're young and good-looking. I wouldn't have believed it unless I had heard it with my own ears. In my opinion, however, it is a thing that young unmarried men ought to know. ”

“ Then a man's business, and his religion, and his politics have a good deal to do with the snoring question. I'll back a Methodist to out-snore any two men of any other denomination, while it's mighty seldom that a Presbyterian can be heard to snore. Ministers of the Gospel are hard snorers as a rule, and next to them come professional musicians. If you look at a man's politics you'll find that a Democrat and a Republican are about equal when it comes to snoring, but that a Prohibitionist will out-snore anybody that ever tried to compete with him. ”

“ Not often, that is to say in sleeping-cars. What they may do elsewhere, I can't say, not being myself a married man. Speaking of women, a curious circumstance happened in a sleeping-car about the time I was telling you of, when we used to carry the car full of miners that had made their pile. ”

“ It was the first sleeping-car ever seen in the North West, and for a time it was very popular; that is on the eastward bound trip. You see, miners that had made their pile at the mines always took the sleeper when they started for the east, and sometimes we'd have every berth in the car engaged. They were that anxious to spend their money that they would have taken any sort of a car that we might have put on the line and charged an extra price for. ”

“ Lots of men were gagged for snoring, and when they showed fight, as they did for the most part, they were knocked on the head, and occasionally the knock was a trifle too hard, and then of course there was another mysterious disappearance. ”