The train was now full of ravening passengers.  And as Elkhart with infinite shyness approached, the ravening passengers formed in files in the corridors, and their dignity was jerked about by the speed of the icy train, and they waited and waited, like mendicants at the kitchen entrance of a big restaurant.  And at long last, when we had ceased to credit that any such place as Elkhart existed, Elkhart arrived.  Two restaurant-cars were coupled on, and, as it were, instantly put to the sack by an infuriated soldiery.  The food was excellent, and newspapers were distributed with much generosity, but some passengers, including ladies, had to stand for another twenty minutes famished at the door of the first car, because the breakfasting accommodation of this particular hotel and club was not designed on the same scale as its bedroom accommodation.  We reached Chicago one hundred and ten minutes late.  And to compensate me for the lateness, and for the refrigeration, and for the starvation, and for being forced to eat my breakfast hurriedly under the appealing, reproachful gaze of famishing men and women, an official at the Lasalle station was good enough to offer me a couple of dollars.  I accepted them....

[Illustration:  IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING STREAM]

An unfortunate accident, you say.  It would be more proper to say a series of accidents.  I think “the greatest train in the world” is entitled to one accident, but not to several.  And when, in addition to being a train, it happens to be a hotel and club, and not an experiment, I think that a system under which a serious breakdown anywhere between Syracuse and Elkhart (about three-quarters of the entire journey) is necessarily followed by starvation—­I think that such a system ought to be altered—­by Americans.  In Europe it would be allowed to continue indefinitely.

Beyond question my experience of American trains led me to the general conclusion that the best of them were excellent.  Nevertheless, I saw nothing in the organization of either comfort, luxury, or safety to justify the strange belief of Americans that railroad traveling in the United States is superior to railroad traveling in Europe.  Merely from habit, I prefer European trains on the whole.  It is perhaps also merely from habit that Americans prefer American trains.

* * * * *

As regards methods of transit other than ordinary railroad trains, I have to admit a certain general disappointment in the United States.  The Elevated systems in the large cities are the terrible result of an original notion which can only be called unfortunate.  They must either depopulate the streets through which they run or utterly destroy the sensibility of the inhabitants; and they enormously increase and complicate the dangers of the traffic beneath them.  Indeed, in the view of the unaccustomed stranger, every Elevated is an affliction so appallingly hideous that no degree of convenience could atone for its horror.  The New York Subway is a masterpiece of celerity, and in other ways less evil than an Elevated, but in the minimum decencies of travel it appeared to me to be inferior to several similar systems in Europe.