I return to the spluttering electric lamps and to the continually coming and going multitudes of passengers. “No Smoking” is one of the notices on the walls. Two men have lighted their cigars right under it. They remind one of the duellists in “Marion de Lorme,” who fight beneath the cardinal’s proclamation. The _café_ is bright and inviting, and its chocolate is as comforting as the literature of the book-stall. The novels of Howells and James and Braddon and Black are here, and the Christmas numbers of the “Illustrated London News” and the “Graphic”; so likewise are the Christmas and New Year’s cards of Marcus Ward, De la Rue, and Lowell. I purchase the latest novelty in books, “John Bull and His Island,” and try to read. I look up now and then to see the crowd file off through the ticket-doors to go to Bethlehem, Catasauqua, Lansdown, New Market, Bloomsbury, Waverly, Linden, Philadelphia, West Point, Catskill, Albans, New Scotland, Port Jackson, Schenectady, and other towns and cities, the names of which stir my thoughts into a strange jumble of reflections, biblical, topographical, and otherwise. Bethlehem and Bloomsbury! Were ever cues for fancy wider apart? “Over here,” I read in “John Bull and His Island,” the writer referring to London, “you are not locked up in a waiting-room until your train comes in. You roam where you like about the station, and your friends may see you off and give you a hand-shake as the train leaves the platform. The functionary is scarcely known. There are more of them at the station of _Fouilly les Epinards_ than in the most important station in London. You see placards everywhere: ‘Beware of Pick-pockets’; ‘Ascertain that your change is right before leaving the booking-desk.’ The Englishman does not like being taken in hand like a baby.” Curiously the American is treated on the railroads very much as in France. As to placard-notices you see cautions against pick-pockets, and the London warning as to change. Some of the other notifications in American stations are curious: “No Loafing allowed in this Depot”; “Don’t Spit on the Floor.” Douglas Jerrold’s joke about the two angry foreigners who exclaimed, “I spit upon you!” has more point here than in England; for no apartment is sacred enough in this free country to keep out the spittoon, which, in some places, is designed in such a way as to indicate a strong intention to make it ornamental as well as useful.