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My picture had vanished.

He was sixty-five, if a day; gray, with bushy eyebrows, piercing brown eyes, heavy, well-trimmed mustache, strong chin and nose, with fine determined lines about the mouth. A man in perfect health, his full throat browned with many weathers showing above a low collar caught together by a loose black cravat–a handsome, rather dashing sort of a man for one so old.

“I say it is a shame, sir,” he continued, “the way they are lynching the negroes around here. Have you read the Extra?” passing it over to me –“Another this morning at Cramptown. It’s an infernal outrage, sir!”

I had read the “Extra,” with all its sickening details, and so handed it back to him.

“I quite agree with you,” I said; “but this man was a brute.”

“No doubt of it, sir. We’ve got brutal negroes among us, just as we’ve got brutal white men. But that’s no reason why we should hang them without a trial; we still owe them that justice. When we dealt fairly with them there was never any such trouble. There were hundreds of plantations in the South during the war where the only men left were negroes. We trusted our wives and children to them; and yet such outrages as these were unheard of and absolutely impossible. I don’t expect you to agree with me, of course; but I tell you, sir, the greatest injustice the North over did the slave was in robbing him of his home. I am going to have a smoke before going to bed. Won’t you join me?”

Acquaintances are quickly made and as quickly ended in a Pullman. Men’s ways lie in such diverse directions, and the hours of contact are often so short, that no one can afford to be either ungracious or exclusive. The “buttoned-up” misses the best part of travelling. He is like a camera with the cap on–he never gets a new impression. The man with the shutters of his ears thrown wide and the lids of his eyes tied back gets a new one every hour.

If, in addition to this, he wears the lens of his heart upon his sleeve, and will adjust it so as to focus the groups around him–it may be a pair of lovers, or some tired mother, or happy child, or lonely wayfarer, or a waif–he will often get a picture of joy, or sorrow, or hope–life dramas all–which will not only enrich the dull hours of travel, but will leave imprints on the mind which can be developed later into the richest and tenderest memories of his life.

I have a way of arranging my own sensitized plates, and I get a certain amount of entertainment out of the process, and now and then a Rembrandt effect whose lights and darks often thrill me for days.

So when this unknown man, with his young legs and his old face, asked me, on one minute’s acquaintance, to smoke, I accepted at once.

“I am right about it, my dear sir,” he continued, biting off the end of a cigar and sharing with me the lighted match. “The negro is infinitely worse off than in the slave days. We never had to hang any one of them then to make the others behave themselves.”

“How do you account for it?” I asked, settling myself in my chair. (We were alone in the smoking compartment.)

“Account for what?”

“The change that has come over the South–to the negro,” I answered.

“The negro has become a competitor, sir. The interests of the black man and the white man now lie apart. Once the white man was his friend; now he is his rival.”

His eyes were boring into mine; his teeth set tight.

The doctrine was new to me, but I did not interrupt him.

“It wasn’t so in the old days. We shared what we had with them. One-third of the cabins of the South were filled with the old and helpless. Now these unfortunates are out in the cold; their own people can’t help them, and the white man won’t.”