was called a palace ear and did its enterprising best to justify that
title. It was almost an apotheosis of architectural bad taste. Disfigured
by all manner of moldings, cornices, grilles and dinky plush
curtains--head-bumping, dust-catching, useless--it was a decorative
orgy, as well as one of the very foundations of the newspaper school of
humor.

Suddenly the Pullman Company awoke to the absurdity of it all. More than
ten years ago it came to the decision that architecture was all right in
its way, but that it was not a fundamental part of car building. It
separated the two. It began to throw out the grilles and the other
knickknacks, even before it had committed itself definitely to the use
of the steel car.

Recently it has done much more. It has banished all but the very
simplest of the moldings, and all the hangings save those that are
absolutely necessary to the operation of the car. It has studied and it
has experimented until it has produced in the sleeping car of to-day
what is probably the most efficient railroad vehicle in the world. Our
foreign cousins scoff at it and call it immodest; but we may reserve our
own opinion as to the relative modesty of some of their institutions.

* * * * *

This, however, is not the story of the Pullman car. It is the story of
that ebony autocrat who presides so genially and yet so firmly over it.
It is the story of George the porter--the six thousand Georges standing
to-night to greet you and the other traveling folk at the doors of the
waiting cars. And George is worthy of a passing thought. He was born in
the day when the negro servant was the pride of America--when the black