the veteran from the Congressional merely as Mr. Forrest. He was General
Forrest now--a title he bears proudly and which he will carry with him
all the long years of his life.

What becomes of the older porters?

Sometimes, when the rush of the fast trains, the broken nights, the
exposure and the hard, hard work begin to be too much for even sturdy
Afric frames, they go to the "super" and beg for the "sick man's run"--a
leisurely sixty or a hundred miles a day on a parlor car, perhaps on a
side line where travel is light and the parlor car is a sort of
sentimental frippery; probably one of the old wooden cars: the Alicia,
or the Lucille, or the Celeste, still vain in bay windows and grilles,
and abundant in carvings. For a sentimental frippery may be given a
feminine name and may bear her years gracefully--even though she does
creak in all her hundred joints when the track is the least bit uneven.

As to the sick man's tips, the gratuity is no less a matter of keen
interest and doubt at sixty than it is at twenty-six. And though there
is a smile under that clean mat of kinky white hair, it is not all
habit--some of it is still anticipation. But quarters and half dollars
do not come so easily to the old man in the parlor car as to his younger
brother on the sleepers, or those elect who have the smokers on the fat
runs. To the old men come dimes instead--some of them miserable affairs
bearing on their worn faces the faint presentments of the ruler on the
north side of Lake Erie and hardly redeemable in Baltimore or
Cincinnati. Yet even these are hardly to be scorned--when one is sixty.

After the sick man's job? Perhaps a sandy farm on a Carolina
hillside, where an old man may sit and nod in the warm sun, and dream