The daily morning journal and courier., 1895-03-14
BY SEA IS THE SAFEST WAY.
GETTING AWAY FROM GREECE HARDER WORK THAN REACHING TT
If One Takes to the Railroad He is Detain- ed for Hours at One Station and is in Ad- dltion Compelled to Endure the Com panionship of Undesirable Persons.

ed for Hours at One Station and is in Ad
 dition Compelled to Endure the Com
 panionship of Undesirable Persons.
 Brindisi, Italy, Feb. p.
 To the Editor of the JOURNAL AND GoURIEI
 Getting away from Greece is far more
 of a performance than reaching it
 You can only do it by sea any way
 and just now the only safe sea-way i
 by Patras to Brindisi by the little Ital
 ian steamer which runs to and fro
 The large steamers all reach Greco,
 from Constantinople, and all, owing tx
 the cholera scare, are subject to quar
 antine. From Athens to Patras Is only
 137 miles by rail, but it takes the trair seven and a half hours to run the dis tance. There is no reason why tho
 train should go SO slowly; nor why the
 boat should not start before 10 D. m.
 nor why it should stop four hours al
 Corfu when one would do; nor why il
 at night, especially when all trains leave Brindisi at six in the morning, thus leaving those who are going straight on with five of the most un-
 comfortable hours of the night on their
 hands, and nothing to do but to walk about the town in the darkness, or to
 sit in silent misery around the hotel fire. No one could possibly be hired to
 stay on the miserable boat moment longer than actually necessary. The
 best way to do it is to sit up till the
 boat lands, then take a room in this very hotel and go to bed, though you lose a day by doing so.
 Greek railroads are run on Greek ideas One Greek idea is to divide car into two rooms and to run a bench around the rooms, except of course where the doors come in. If your seat happens to be in the corner, or next the corner, you had better have your legs cut off to begin with, or induce your neighbor to have the operation per formed on himself, for there is no pos sible space about the corner for over two legs. In fact the only places where person with legs can sit is midway between where, for a small space, legs are not skewed in from the adjoining corners. Parties preferring to keep their legs will find them painfully cramped, and twisted all out of shape, long before the journey is ended. The Greek idea is presumably that with knees and noses directed to common center, there will easily spring pleas ant intercourse and amiable converse. The most conspicuous party in the car yesterday was an ample creature who not only filled her side full, but over flowed several pairs of adjoining knees. Somebody whispered that she was the duenna of the Turkish ambassadors harem." She had with her her maid, whose business it was to stuff her noble mistress with all man ner of sweets and to wash her noble mistress fingers when the sweets stuck them together The ex-duenna must have been good looking when she was young; but she had spread far be- yond all the boundaries of beauty. She still preserved a leer in her large, round, pig-eye; and there were craters here and there in the voluminous folds | 0f her visage which marked the sites of | ancient dimples Her digesting organs | were evidently unimpaired; as before | we reached Patras she must have con sumed cakes and candies enough to have started g. fourishing pastry shop. |
 Another incident of the trip was a | funeral party which occupied a similar | 'oom in an adjoining second-class car 'iage. The party consisted of a young | woman, the especially bereaved; | young man, probably her husband; an ,ther equally young man; large as- of women, old and young; lnd the corpse, a baby, done up into arge, round most fearful and repulsive bundle by all the family rags and cast if clothing. The party entered their oom with shrill howls and chattering and kept up the deafening din or five mortal hours while passing the Lwful bundle from lap to lap. No where but in Greece could railroad or lealth officials allow such an offensive | md noxious performance. The Greeks must be endowed with extraordinary nortuary lung power, or the party would have yelled itself to death long tefore it reached it's destination. As it vas, the young woman, who had taken he principal part in the affair tainted cad away after alighting, and so ab- orbed the attention of all concerned hat only as the train was starting the econd young man remembered the recious bundle, hopped back into the ar and rescued it with hardly a sec nd to spare Just as the train was a stalwart Amazonian 1ourner gave a small boy cuff that ent him spinning like a badly spun op; all because he was lamenting at 1 n amateur rate to which neither his ears nor his relation to the corpse l ave permission. Truly the modern { reeks are queer specimens! At Patras miseries begin again. { ook's man marshals you into an awk ard squad and marches you to dinner. ( fter dinner ranks are reformed you l ro booda5 fp1. xul1 1,f. IyO11 f