noon
`` Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering ? '' The younger poet paused a moment . Then he said , with the air of a cross-examined witness , `` Under advice of counsel , I decline to answer . '' On a night well toward its noon , many years ago , a friend of the Easy Chair -LRB- so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy -RRB- was walking wearily up and down in the station at Portland , Maine , and wondering if the time for his train to start would ever come , and , if the time did come , whether his train would really take advantage of that opportunity to leave Portland . It was , of course , a night train , and of course he had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car ; there are certain things that come by nature with the comfortable classes to which the friend of the Easy Chair belonged . He would no more have thought of travelling in one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in the station than he would have thought of going by stage , as he could remember doing in his boyhood . He stopped beside the cars and considered their potential passengers with amaze and compassion ; he laughed at the notion of his being himself one of them ; and , when he turned his back on them , he was arrested by the sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor-car which , for reasons of its own , was waiting in luminous detachment apart from the day coaches .