Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people's
baggage, I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom.
Perhaps in this, the deference for any one within his rights,
peculiar to the faery dream, operates the security of the
respective owners of baggage that could otherwise easily be the
general prey. While I saw constant regard paid for personal
rights, I saw only one case in which they were offensively
asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we
attempted to take possession of a compartment we had paid for
from the nearest junction, in order to make certain of it. We
found it in the keeping of a gentleman who had turned it from a
non-smoking into a smoking compartment, and bestrewn it with his
cigar ashes. When told by the porters that we had engaged the
compartment, he refused to stir, and said that he had paid for
his seat, and he should not leave it till he was provided with
another. In vain they besought him to consider our hard case, in
being kept out of our own, and promised him another place as good
as the one he held.
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