Anybody with the price of a ticket can travel from one city to another, but it takes a real genius to pack a trunk. The art must be practiced in its purity; there must be no mixing of the pancake (or roll-'em-up) style with the flapjack (or spread-'em-out-flat) style. Such eclecticism is pernicious.
Considered from another point of view, packing is a fascinating game. You put all sorts of objects in a trunk, the baggage man churns them thoroughly, and then you take them out again and try to guess what they are. You meet with a hundred different surprises. For instance, you never would have dreamed that a derby hat could turn inside out, or that a single suit could acquire ninety-three separate and distinct creases, or that a book could swallow a mirror and have indigestion from it, or that a bottle of ink inside seven wrappings could break and assert itself over a pile of shirts and a month's supply of collars.
But the great paradox of packing is that a trunk is always full when you close it and always three-quarters empty when you open it. The trunk that nothing but violent stamping will shut is the very trunk that, a few hours later, bounces your possessions about like beans in a rattle; so that when you lift the lid again you find them huddled forlornly in a corner, exhausted and battered from their shuttle-istics.
Another peculiarity is that nothing that you want is where you think it is. The garment that you clearly remember putting in the right-hand front corner of the top tray is sure to turn up at last in the opposite part of the bottom. Indeed, sooner will the Sphinx give up her secret than the trunk give up the thing you are looking for. To dig up _de profundis_ a shoehorn that you need is a more remarkable achievement than to unearth a new Pompeii.
Rooting is a science. Suppose, for instance, you wish to locate a pair of scissors without disturbing the general order. You begin by classifying the scissors in your mind, in order that you may calculate their position in the trunk. You consider them with reference to the following scheme of arrangement, which you recite as if you were an elevator boy in a department store:
1. _Main Tray._ Shirts, collars, hats, handkerchiefs, _and_ toilet articles.