I
imagine they wrote a letter to the London Times about it afterward.
As is the pleasing habit of traveling Englishmen, they had brought
with them everything portable they owned. Each one had four or
five large handbags, and a carryall, and a hat box, and his
tea-caddy, and his plaid blanket done up in a shawlstrap, and his
framed picture of the Death of Nelson--and all the rest of it; and
they piled those things in the luggage racks until both the racks
were chock-full; so the rest of us had to hold our baggage in our
laps or sit on it. One of them was facing me not more than five
or six feet distant. He never saw me though. He just gazed
steadily through me, studying the pattern of the upholstery on the
seat behind me; and I could tell by his look that he did not care
for the upholstering--as very naturally he would not, it being
French.
We had traveled together thus for some hours when one of them began
to cloud up for a sneeze. He tried to sidetrack it, but it would
not be sidetracked. The rest of us, looking on, seemed to hear
that sneeze coming from a long way off. It reminded me of a
musical-sketch team giving an imitation of a brass band marching
down Main Street playing the Turkish Patrol--dim and faint at
first, you know, and then growing louder and stronger, and gathering
volume until it bursts right in your face.
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