The Project Gutenberg eBook, The World on Wheels and Other Sketches, by
Benjamin F. (Benjamin Franklin) Taylor
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Title: The World on Wheels and Other Sketches
Author: Benjamin F. (Benjamin Franklin) Taylor
Release Date: January 24, 2014 [eBook #44745]
Language: English
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[Illustration: THE GREEN TRAVELER,
[See page 62.]
THE WORLD ON WHEELS AND OTHER SKETCHES
bY
BENJ. F. TAYLOR
Chicago,
S. C. Griggs & Co.
1874
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
S. C. Griggs & Co.,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
Printed at the Lakeside Press,
Clark and Adams Sts.,
Chicago.
ONLY THIS:
The Wheels in this book ran, during the summer of 1873, through the
columns of THE NEW YORK EXAMINER AND CHRONICLE, to "the head and front
of whose offending," the
REV. EDWARD BRIGHT, D.D.,
who gave those wheels "the right of way," the old rolling stock and a
miscellaneous cargo is
CORDIALLY CONSIGNED.
ROLLING STOCK AND BILL OF LADING.
_THE WORLD ON WHEELS._
CHAPTER. PAGE.
I. THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT 13
II. THE CONCORD COACH 17
III. THE RAGING CANAL 23
IV. THE IRON AGE 30
V. THE IRON HORSE 35
VI. PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS 45
VII. VICIOUS ANIMALS 51
VIII. HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN-MEN 60
IX. IN THE SADDLE 68
X. RACING AND PLOWING 74
XI. SNOW BOUND 82
XII. SCALDED TO DEATH 89
XIII. ALL ABOARD! 94
XIV. EARLY AND LATE 103
XV. DEAD HEADS 112
XVI. WORKING "BY THE DAY" 118
XVII. A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER 123
XVIII. DREAMING ON THE CARS 128
XIX. "MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT" 136
XX. THE MAKER OF CITIES 144
XXI. A CABOOSE RIDE 150
XXII. HATCHING OUT A WOMAN 154
XXIII. A FLANK MOVEMENT 159
XXIV. LIGHT AND SHADE 162
XXV. PRECIOUS CARGOES 168
_BAGGAGE._
I. MY STARRY DAYS 175
II. "NO. 104,163" 193
III. OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER 206
IV. OUT-DOOR PREACHING 216
V. THE STORY OF THE BELL 223
VI. "MY EYE!" 226
VII. THE OLD ROAD 241
VIII. A BIRD HEAVEN 251
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE GREEN TRAVELER _Frontispiece._
THE CONCORD COACH 19
THE BAGGAGE SMASHER 63
A LITTLE LATE 110
BAGGAGE 173
SWITCH OFF 258
THE WORLD ON WHEELS.
CHAPTER I.
THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT.
The perpetual lever called a wheel is the masterpiece of mechanical
skill. At home on sea and land, like the feet of the Proclaiming Angel,
it finds a fulcrum wherever it happens to be. It is the alphabet of
human ingenuity. You can spell out with the wheel and the lever--and
the latter is only a loose spoke of that same wheel--pretty much
everything in the Nineteenth Century but the Christian Religion and the
Declaration of Independence. Having thought about it a minute more, I
am inclined to except the exceptions, and say they translate the one
and transport the other.
Were you ever a boy? Never? Well, then, my girl, wasn't one of your
first ambitions a finger-ring? And there is your wheel, with a small
live axle in it! But whatever you are, did you ever know a boy worth
naming and owning who did not try to make a wheel out of a shingle, or
a board, or a scrap of tin? Maybe it was as eccentric as a comet's
orbit, and only _wabbled_ when it was meant to whirl, but it was the
genuine curvilinear aspiration for all that. Boys, young and old,
"take to" wheels as naturally as they take to sin. I am sorry for the
fellow that never rigged a water-wheel in the spring swell of the
meadow brook, or mounted a wind-mill on the barn gable, or drew a
wagon of his own make. My sympathies do not extend to his lack of a
velocipede, which is nothing if not a bewitched and besaddled
wheelbarrow.
In fact, it seems to be the tendency of everything to _be_ a wheel.
There's your tumbling dolphin, and there's your whirling world. The
conqueror whose hurry set on fire the axles of his chariot was no
novelty. Who knows that the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis,
lighting up the sky about the polar circles in the night-time, may not
be the flashes from the glowing axles of the planet? Who knows that
the ice and snow may not be piled up about the Arctic and Antarctic
just to keep the flaming gudgeons as cool as possible? Does Sir John
Franklin? Does _any_body?
Take an old man's memory. Only give it a touch, and it turns like a
wheel between his two childhoods, and 1810 comes round before you can
count the spokes, and 1874 hardly out of sight.
When they made narrow wooden hands with slender wrists, and called them
oars, and galleys swept the Eastern seas in a grave and stately way,
they did well. When they fashioned broad and ghastly palms of canvas
that laid hold upon the empty air, and named them sails, they did
better. When they grouped around an axle the iron hands that buffeted
the waves and put the sea, discomfited, rebuked, behind the flying
ship, they had their wheel, and they did best!
A one-horse wagon--for nothing was buggy then, but neglected
bedsteads--artistically bilious, and striped like a beetle, with a
paneled box high before and behind, like an inverted _chapeau_,
and a seat with a baluster back, softened and graced with a buffalo
robe, warm in winter--and in summer also--was one of the wheeled
wonders of my boyhood. No sitting in that wagon like a right-angled
triangle--room in front for any possible length of leg, and a
foot-stove withal--room behind for two or three handfuls of children,
and a little hair-trunk with a bit of brass-nail alphabet on the cover.
Curiously enough, the wagon was owned by that noble Baptist pioneer of
the New York North Woods, Elder--not Reverend but revered--JOHN
BLODGETT, and in it he used to traverse "East road," and "West road,"
and "Number Three road," and go to Denmark and Copenhagen and Leyden
and Turin, and other places in foreign parts, without shipping a sea,
or, to borrow a morsel of thunder, without "seeing a ship." His was the
voice of "John crying in the wilderness"--John, the Beloved disciple,
he surely was.
Before he went to "the Ohio," for that is what they called it in the
years ago, he preached a farewell to the saddened friends, "Sorrowing
most of all that they should see his face no more," and then some
Christians, some children and some sinners accompanied him ten miles on
his way, and, after that, the paneled wagon was lost in the wilderness
and the West, and we all turned sorrowing home, and his words "no more"
proved true.
And the next wheeled wonder was a calash-topped chaise, heavy, squeaky
on its two great loops of leather springs, and a swaying, sleepy way
with it, that, for the occupants was as easy as lying, but for the
horse as wearisome as Pilgrim Christian's knapsack of iniquity.
CHAPTER II.
THE CONCORD COACH.
Fifty miles north of Utica, New York, as the crow flies, there is a
village. What there was of it in the old days lay in the bottom of a
bay of land bounded on the north, south, and west by wooded hills, with
some stone-mason work in them older than the Vatican. But now the
beautiful town rises like a spring-tide high up the green sides of
the bay. Once in twenty-four hours over the south hill lurched a
stage-coach. The tin horn was whipped out of its sheath by the driver,
and a short, sharp, nasal twang rang out, rising sometimes in one
long clear note, that warbled away in an acoustic ringlet, like its
aristocratic cousin with a mouth like a brazen morning-glory--the
bugle.
Every thing in the little village was broad awake. Doors flew open,
faces were framed in at the windows, children hung on the gates. Then
the driver gathered up the ribbons of his four-in-hand, swung off from
the coach-top his long-lashed whip with its silken cracker, flicked
artistically the off leader's "nigh" ear, gave the wheelers a
neighborly slap, and with jingle of chains and rattle of bolt, and a
sea-going rock and swing, down the hill he thundered and through the
main street, the horses' ears laid close to their heads like a running
rabbit's, a great cloud of dust rolling up behind the leather "boot"
the color of an elephant, the passengers looking out at the stage
windows, until, with a jolt and one sharp summons of the horn, like
the note of a vexed and exasperated bee, the craft brings-to at the
Post-office, and the driver whirls the padlocked pouch out from under
his mighty boots to the ground, and then exploding the tip-end of
his twelve-foot lash like a pistol-shot, he makes a sweep and comes
about with a rattling halt in front of the stage-house. The fat old
landlord--fat and old when you were a boy, and alive yet--shuffles out
in slippers, opens the coach-door, swings down the little iron ladder
with two rounds, and the passengers make a landing. One of them may
have been General Brady, the man who said, or so they say, when told he
could not survive the illness that prostrated him, "Beat the drum, the
knapsack's slung, and Hugh Brady is ready to march!" Or it may have
been Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king, and yet with his head on, which is
not after the historic manner of monarchs out of business, going to
his wilderness possessions in the North Woods. Or it may have been
Frederick Hassler, the Swiss, Chief of the United States Survey in
the long ago, _en route_ for Cape Vincent--the man who knew more and
tougher mathematics than all of his successors together, and who could
say more while the hostlers were changing horses than anybody else
could say in sixty minutes. Meanwhile the spanking team, loosed from
the coach, file off in a knowing way and a cloud of steam, meeting with
a snort of recognition the relay that is filing out to take their
places.
[Illustration: THE CONCORD COACH]
That yellow, mud-bespattered stage, with "E. Merriam, No. _something_,"
blazoned on the doors, was the one thing that linked the small
village with the great world, brought tidings of wars, accidents and
incidents, that had grown gray on the journey, and word from far-away
friends whose graves might have waxed green while the letters they had
written, and secured with a round red moon of a wafer, and sealed with
a thumb or a thimble, were yet trampled beneath the driver's feet like
grain on the threshing-floor. Think of that coach creeping like an
insect, for sixpence a mile, and five miles to the hour, to and fro
between East and West, the only established means of communication!
Think of its nine passengers inside, knocked about like the unlucky
ivories in a dice-box, between New York and Detroit, between Boston
and Washington. They get in, all strangers; the ladies on the back
seat, the man who is sea-sick, by one coach-window, the man that chews
"the weed, it was the devil sowed the seed," at the other; somebody
going to Congress, somebody going for goods, somebody going to be
married. They are all packed in at last like sardines, with perhaps an
urchin chucked into some crevice, to make all snug. There are ten
sorts of feet, and two of a sort, dovetailed in a queer mosaic upon
the coach-floor. The door closes with a bang, the driver fires a
ringing shot or two from his whip-lash, and away they pitch and lurch.
Think of them riding all day, all night, all day again, crushed hats
and elbowed ribs, jumping up and bouncing down into each other's laps
every little while with some plunge of the coach; butting at each
other in a belligerent way, now and then, as if "Aries the ram" were
the ruling sign for human kind; begging each other's pardon, laughing
at each other's mishaps, strangers three hours ago, getting to know
each other well and like each other heartily, and parting at last
with a clasp of the hand and a sigh of regret. I think a fifty-mile
battering in a stage-coach used to shake people out of the shell of
their crustaceous proprieties, and make more lifelong friends than a
voyage of five thousand miles by rail. The contemplation for a day or
two of a woman's back-hair or a man's bumps of combativeness, is about
as merry as a catacomb tea-party, and about as conducive to lively
friendships.
All of us who have arrived at years of discretion--had Methuselah?--have
had a suspicion for some time that this is not the same world we were
born into. Such a looking-over-the-shoulder as the writer has just
indulged in brightens the dim suspicion into certainty. It _is_ a
grander world, with grander needs and agencies to match. The little
iron wheels have trundled the big wooden wheels out of the way. The
dear old Concord coaches of the past are driven to the confines of
civilization. Jehu has swung himself down from his box, thrust the butt
end of his whip-stock into the tin horn's mouth, hung them up on a nail
behind the door, and died. The swallows flash in and out at the diamond
lights in the old stage barn, its only occupants.
I visited Fort Scott a while ago--Fort Scott, Kansas, that wonderful
bit of metropolitan vigor in the wilderness. The Missouri, Kansas and
Texas Railroad had reached it, and gone on to the Indian country. It
had been a grand center for radiating stage lines, and the day the
stages were to break up camp at Fort Scott and go deeper into Kansas,
farther into Missouri, somebody, who had caught the sentiment of the
thing, proposed that all the coaches should be grouped in one place,
and a photographer should train his piece of small artillery upon
them, and so they should be "taken." The picture is before me. The
four-in-hands, the great coaches, the snug covered hacks for the cross
cuts, the drivers in position, drivers and stages alike "all full
inside," and a sprinkling of deck passengers. It was the work of an
instant; the coaches were emptied and wheeled away, to be seen and
heard and welcomed and looked after in Fort Scott no more.
CHAPTER III.
THE RAGING CANAL.
The world has certainly grown. Putting the period just in time, the
statement is a safe one--"has certainly grown." When De Witt Clinton
developed the Dutch idea in America, and made a line of poetry from
tide-water to Lake Erie, which people vilified and christened
"Clinton's Ditch," the world was not quite ready for it, and the
Governor went ahead in a canal-boat! Fancy that world distanced by a
three-horse-power tandem team at six miles an hour to-day.
But it was a stately affair then. There was a barrel of salt water
standing at the bow of the packet-boat. There was the proud and
portly Governor erect behind the barrel like Virgil's ears of
attention--_arrectis auribus_. There were the horses rosetted and
bespangled. There were the high and mighty dignitaries on deck,
clustered like young bees on a hive's front door-step at swarming
time. There were the enthusiastic crowds along the way. Arrived at
Buffalo, amid surges of music and rattle of cannon, the Chief
Executive poured that brackish Atlantic water into the fine indigo
blue of Lake Erie. It was not quite so grand as the old ceremonial
when the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic, but it _meant_ a
great deal more. It meant Bishop Berkely, who said something about a
Westward-going star, of which some mention has been made once or
twice. It meant Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, in that far future which
is our instant present. It meant EMPIRE! You can count the acts that
have meant more, within a hundred years, upon four fingers and a
thumb--more than ladling out that barrel of sea-water in a strange
place. Well, the boats began to slide along the thoroughfare of water,
and go up stairs and down stairs in a strange way; and they multiplied
like the sluggard's schoolma'am,--who was his _aunt_, also,--till
there are boats in sight in summer days everywhere between Buffalo and
tide-water; and they grow larger, till there are a thousand craft on
the Erie Canal of greater tonnage than the vessel from whose deck
Lawrence sent up the dying charge that made him as deathless as the
Pleiades.
The cargoes of those boats, when they began to creep, was something
wonderful: men, women and children, plows, axes and Bibles; teachers,
preachers and Ramage presses, along with bedsteads that corded up and
creaked like gates in high winds; big wheels, little wheels and reels,
looms with timber enough in them for saw-mills and a log or two left to
begin upon. So you see, when they went West in those days they packed
up their homes and took them along. You were sure of their finding
anchor-ground somewhere, for how could a man go adrift with a wife,
five children, a brass kettle and a feather-bed tied to him? You were
sure, too, that the world would not be wronged out of a home--perhaps a
better and a happier one than the man set afloat on Clinton's Ditch for
a place nearer sundown.
Thus it was that the grand westward drift of things received its
first impulse. Churches with steeples to them, school-houses full of
children, newspapers, farms, Christian homes, not one of which
appeared on the bills of lading, were all tumbled aboard the canal-boat
amidships or somewhere, though nobody seemed to know it. The mighty
fleet of white-decked "liners," looking like Brobdignagian--that word
won't hurt you if you don't go near it!--ants' eggs with windows in
them, has had more to do with the march of civilization than all the
aquatic armaments that ever thundered. Sometimes, scurrying along in
the cars at thirty miles an hour, you catch glimpses of nests of these
eggs adrift in the green fields, floating by the white villages, and
advancing, by contrast, so wonderfully slow that they go backward.
Now and then a chit of a girl, with a little market-basket of garden
vegetables upside down on the top of her head, or a young fellow who
parts his hair in the middle, and has nothing else to part with worth
mentioning, catches a glimpse of the eggs, too, and tosses a sniff of
contempt at them out of the window, never dreaming that he looks upon a
letter or two of the alphabet of progress.
I never see one of those boats without a sigh of regret, not because I
want to be captain or cook or anything, but because I took my first
foreign voyage on one of them, and the boat was a "liner" at that! We
"took ship" at Oneida, took water along the way, took soundings when we
ran aground, took steamer at Buffalo. It was a taking trip. Of the
passengers, one turned into Doctor of Divinity, another into Professor
of Latin in the University of Michigan, a third into President of a
Southern College, a fourth into the pastor of a Michigan church, two
bright and pleasant young ladies into dust long ago, and the seventh
and youngest into the writer of this sketch.
It was a merry, care-free party. Not one of the survivors can say
that for himself to-day. We were clustered in the little forward cabin.
We ran over the deck to the after-cabin for meals. We sat upon our
baggage, and took something more than a bird's-eye view of the country.
We told stories and sang songs and dreamed dreams. We went into cool
locks where the water splashed and tumbled about the bows, and were
glad. We suffocated ourselves with blankets when we crossed the
Montezuma mosquitoes. Why not? Verily, there is but one Marsh there,
but of mosquitoes there are several. I have heard of Montezuma's death.
It was some time ago, but it would have been no wonder had he died
young, not because of the love of the Gods, but of the mosquitoes. We
sat on the deck and watched the steersman's intonations. When he cried,
"Low _bridge_!" we merely ducked our heads; but when he said, "_Low_
bridge!" down we went flat upon the floor like a parcel of undiscovered
idolaters. The Palinurus slued the stern of the boat around, and we
leaped off upon the "heel-path" and took a stroll. He drove bows on
upon the opposite shore, and we took a walk on the "tow-path" with the
"drive," who looked like a bundle of old clothes, was as smart as a
whip, and profane as "our army in Flanders." He sang songs through the
night and the rain as happy as a frog, and when, covered with mud and
water, he came aboard to eat, he looked like a bewildered muskrat, and
his tracks like a muskrat's also.
We used to hear one genuine word of old English in those seafaring
days. Perhaps some other ambitious "liner" was pulling out ahead of us.
You confer with the "drive" as to the chance of passing it. You offer
him a shilling to try, and his under jaw drops like the lower half of a
bellows. But promise him a "scale"--scale, skilling, shilling--and he
gets all the tough pull out of his tandem that there is in it, and
goes by if he can. Websterian "probabilities" says that is not the
derivation of "scale" at all, but no matter. So you see, we went to sea
without leaving shore. Now and then a cigar-shaped packet, fuller of
windows on the sides than ever a German flute was of finger-holes,
would pass us with a swash and the blast of a bugle to "open lock," and
the three horses at a swinging trot, the deck crowded with passengers,
and the cook in the kitchen stewing and frying and roasting himself and
the dinner in the same kettles.
It was the aristocrat of canal craft, the packet was, the captain was
_somebody_, and wore gloves, and when on my voyage I saw one coming, I
went down into the cabin, red as to my ears, for something I had
forgotten, and that I never found in time to come out of the egg till
the packet had gone by. It has since occurred to me that possibly the
redness of ears at that time might not have been a quality so
remarkable as their length. How you would like the snuggery of the
cabin now, and the shelf of a berth that you couldn't turn over in if a
heavy fellow happened to be sagging on the shelf above you, and the
canal-banks even with the top of your head when you sit down, and the
sun about as hot upon the roof as if he had actually taken a deck
passage and come bodily aboard, is not a matter of doubt. But the
memory of that voyage is pleasant, after all--after all _what_? all
these years; like the music of Caryl, "pleasant but mournful to the
soul." And should this short story of a long voyage bring back to any
reader some such journey that _he_ took in the years that are gone,
some cheerful hours he spent, some cherished friends he made, some
faces he learned to love, that for him shall never be changed nor sent
away, then these paragraphs are not vain.
CHAPTER IV.
THE IRON AGE.
They tarried longer by the way in those days, and they _lived_ longer,
most of them. I think, too, they knew each other better, possibly loved
each other more, when they went six miles an hour, than we know each
other now that we go sixty. Mind, I would have nobody turn into muriate
of soda and make a Lot's wife of himself on my account, but then a
harness with neither hold-back nor breeching is a dangerous thing
unless the world is a dead level, than which nothing is so very dead,
not even a graveyard. The world has certainly grown. These sketches are
written at a place in the State of New York known on the old maps as
Chadwick's Bay. It is flanked by one of the loveliest villages in all
the empire. To that village came the late Rev. Dr. ELISHA TUCKER, whose
memory is yet fragrant in the churches--then neither Reverend nor
Doctor, but the plain and primitive Elder Tucker--came with his young
wife, who went a thousand miles alone, a while ago, to visit
friends!--came from Buffalo forty miles along the Lake shore to that
lovely village in a one-horse wagon, and took up his life work. There
was not a Baptist church west of him. He preached the first sermon
anybody ever heard in Cleveland. A schooner with rusty sails came
sliding into Chadwick's Bay with his small store of household wealth.
The painted Senecas and the smoky Onondagas went gliding about like
vanishing shadows. Deer trooped across the landscapes like flocks of
sheep. Speckled trout--nature's great piscatorial triumph, if they
_didn't_ weigh but a pound apiece--spotted with carmine and gold,
leaped out of the cold brooks into the sunshine. There is a roll of
dull thunder day and night within ear-shot of where I write these lines
at Chadwick's Bay. Twenty-five hundred cars rumble by every twenty-four
hours. Flocks and herds from a thousand hills and plains roll along on
iron casters like pieces of heavy cabinet-work. Broad harvests trundle
Eastward to tide-water. They rattle over the lines of longitude, and
set them together in their flight like the stripes on the American
flag.
It is the World on Wheels.
The story of the Locomotive is the history of mechanical invention. It
is, if you please, the _monogram_ of the right-hand cunning of mankind.
In its finished state, standing upon the track as it does to-day, in
its burnished bravery of steel and brass, its shining arms thrust into
the caskets slung lightly at its sides, ready at an instant's notice to
pluck out great handfuls of power and toss them in fleecy volumes along
the way--I want Job to take a look and tell us all about it. He that so
described a horse of flesh and blood that Landseer could have painted
the creature if he had never seen one, must be able to handle the
Locomotive without gloves. Job would have been the man for the job.
Did you ever tell anybody that the Locomotive is a familiar
acquaintance of yours--that you are on speaking terms with it? If
you never did, then never do, for it will strain your listener's
credulity and your credibility fearfully. I have a sort of
touch-the-brim-of-the-hat respect for the thing, and am never so
busy that I cannot give it a civil look as it goes by. The dull
prose strikes into a quickstep as I think about it:
Would ye know the grand Song that shall sing out the age--
That shall flow down the world as the lines down the page--
That shall break through the zones like a North and South river,
From winter to spring making music forever?
I heard its first tones by an old-fashioned hearth,
'Twas an anthem's faint cry on the brink of its birth!
'Twas the tea-kettle's drowsy and droning refrain,
As it sang through its nose as it swung from the crane.
Twas a being begun and awaiting its brains--
To be saddled and bridled and given the reins.
Now its lungs are of steel and its breathings of fire,
And it craunches the miles with an iron desire,
Its white cloud of a mane like a banner unfurled,
It howls through the hills and it pants round the world!
It furrows the forest and lashes the flood,
And hovers the miles like a partridge's brood.
Oh! stand ye to-day in the door of the heart,
With its nerve raveled out floating free on the air,
And _feeling_ its way with ethereal art
By the flash of the Telegraph everywhere,
And then think, if you can, of a mission more grand
Than a mission to LIVE in this time and this land;
Round the World for a sweetheart an arm you can wind,
And your lips to the ear of listening Mankind!
There used to be a question and answer in the old manuals of Chemistry
that shut together like a pair of scissors: "What are the precious
metals? Gold and silver." How will it do to amend and let the mouthful
of catechism run thus: "What are the precious metals? Iron and brass."
Iron for wheels, and brass for people! That is better because it is
truer. Whoever is curious to know how the name of a certain alloy of
copper and zinc came to take in a mental and moral quality as a third
ingredient, need only post himself a little in insular literature. The
rich ore of the copper mines of Cyprus was called Cyprian brass. Venus
was the chief divinity of the Cyprian people's adoration. Queerly
enough, their quality struck into their _mines_ like a thunderbolt, and
the name of the hard, glittering, resounding metal came to have a
meaning that could not possibly pertain to a well-behaved pair of brass
and irons. Brass in the face is a good thing in a wrong place, but
besides making a capital bearing for a rail-car axle, a little in a
man's purposes, as the world goes, is not so very bad an alloy after
all. It may make them _last_ longer, if nothing more.
CHAPTER V.
THE IRON HORSE.
The world had to wait a weary time for its wheels, simply because the
successors of Tubal and Jubal took something for granted. It is never
safe, as every day's experience proves, to take anything or anybody for
granted. The only safety in praising the average man is to hold on
to your eulogy till he is dead, and done doing altogether. What the
cunning artificers took for granted was this: an engine's pulling power
is equal to its own weight. And so they made wheels with teeth, and
rails with cogs, to help the thing along. They rigged an anomalous,
pre-Adamite fowl's foot with a corrugated sole, on each side of the
engine. These feet were set down one after the other upon the roughened
rail, and pushed the awkward affair in a sort of dromedary way,
monstrous to contemplate and tedious to wait for. Device followed
device, all as vain as the achievement of perpetual motion, until some
man, after a Columbus fashion when he played with a hen's egg, said: Is
this _true_ that we have all been taking for granted? Will not an
engine pull more than its own weight? Let us try it. _They_ did, and
_it_ did. It trailed long streets and great towns of cars--which were
warehouses and dwellings and palatial mansions; which were sheep-folds
and cattle-yards and coal mines--after it at twenty, forty, fifty miles
an hour, as if real estate belonged to the ornithological kingdom, and
had taken perpetual flight like Logan's cuckoo.
When you see a brace of iron bars laid parallel upon the ground, and a
harp of wire strung along beside it, you see the fragment of a man that
can never indulge in a soul without borrowing one. It is the line of a
mighty muscle, and the thread of a fine nerve. On the one, thoughts
fly--thoughts that are "up and dressed" in their verbal clothes. On the
other, things. The one is seven-ninths of a Scriptural aspiration
five-ninths realized: "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might
fly away--and be at rest." The other is the consolidated arm of
Christendom, the common carrier of the movable world. But grand as it
is, and priceless as are the treasures it is bearing, it was too late
for the holiest burden of all time. There was no train to Jerusalem,
and the Lord of Life rode into the city in the humblest guise, upon a
donkey.
At Omaha, one day, I saw a steam caravan come in from what used to be a
"forty years in the wilderness" region, direct from the Golden Gate. It
was the tea-train from the Celestial Kingdom. It was nothing to look
at--the dingy, battered cars, the engineer as if he had been wrestling
with a coal-heaver--but it was much to think of. That cargo came right
out of the West, straight from the "Drowsy East." The bars of the
trans-continental railroad had careened the horizon with their mighty
leverage, and let the cargo through--the very cargo for which they
waited in the old days with their faces toward the rising sun, like a
praying Israelite. The locomotive had wheeled the rolling globe a half
revolution, brought the tide of commerce to the right-about, like a
soldier upon his heel. It has proved to be anything but what it was
suspected of being--the locomotive has--for, made to be a common
carrier, a gigantic, quicktime dray-horse, it is a civilizer, a builder
of cities; and if the three W's, Messrs. Wesley Brothers and
Whitefield, will forgive me, a sort of--_Methodist_; in fact, an
outright circuit-rider, and a missionary, withal! The preachers of
flesh and blood denounced the seraglio and the harems of the American
Desert, but nobody minded it. The law-makers frowned upon them, and
they grew like a garden of cucumbers; were about as far beyond their
jurisdiction as the household economy of "the man in the moon." The
locomotive made for them at last, from Atlantic and Pacific; it brought
the Gentiles and the "Saints" shoulder to shoulder; its mountain-eagle
elocution rang through the valleys of Utah, and sooner or later it will
whistle that barbarism of the Orient down the wind.
The locomotive is a civilizer. It happened to the writer to witness the
splendid display of the Missouri State Fair at Kansas City, that young
Chicago of the red Missouri. Altogether it was the most admirable
display of agricultural products ever seen in the Far West. Than the
artistic grouping of apples in vast variety, nothing finer was ever
witnessed. They were literally "apples of gold in pictures of silver."
Without spot or blemish, better than ever grew in the Garden of Eden,
they were all from the orchards of the wilderness. But the most
interesting and suggestive department, as having direct reference to
the civilizing agency of the locomotive, was one surmounted with the
legend, "The Great American Desert."
Not a thing in it that did not come from the once sterile plain or
inaccessible mountain region; that was not grown in the very realm
set down upon maps hardly twenty years old as a pathless and arid
waste; and not a figure pictured in it, but a bewildered buffalo or
a mounted savage; that was not made possible by the magic touch of
railroad iron. What a maker of new and improved maps is the locomotive!
That department was worthy to be the coat-of-arms of the Angel of
Abundance. Above all, were the antlers of the elk, like the branches
of a blasted tree; and the shaggy head of a buffalo, curly as the
head of the heathen god of wine. Then there were stalks of corn that
would amaze you, and as full of ears as Mr. Spurgeon's audiences.
There were squashes and melons and pumpkin-pies in "the original
package," in whose case the usual law of limitation had been suspended,
and they had grown on without let or hindrance. Wheat that Illinois
would have been proud of. Minerals of wonderful richness and beauty.
Grapes in clusters of ideal symmetry and size. Apples as of a fresh and
new creation that no blighting bug or worm had yet found out. Indeed,
think of anything you like best that grows in a garden, and it was
there, all from the Great American Desert. There was an address to the
assembled thousands, but nothing so eloquent as this upon the power of
the locomotive as a cultivator and civilizer. But for it, the products
would never have been here in Kansas City, nor the producers there in
the wilderness.
Take the Illinois Central Railway; it was to that splendid State what
the rod of Moses was to the rock in the wilderness. It smote it into
life and luxuriance. Down from Chicago to Cairo, just as many miles as
there are days in a year, down from Dunleith to that same capital of
modern Egypt, four hundred and fifty-six miles, it went,--in its time
the stateliest railway enterprise in the world. Had you been a
passenger on a southward-bound train of that road, say sixteen years
ago, you would have traversed a region of magnificent possibilities.
True, the locomotive would have hurried you through unfenced
corn-fields nine miles long, whose rows swung round as the cars flew
on, like vast brigades on drill, but you would have struck out, at
last, upon the untilled and almost untrodden pastures of God. You could
never forget it. The month was September. The train had reached the
center of a grand prairie. The few passengers debarked, and the train
ran on a half mile and left us alone. Around on every side, the prairie
curved up to the edge of the sky. It was a mighty bowl, and we, served
up in the bottom of it, a very diminutive bill of fare for such a
tremendous dish. The gaudy yellow and red Fall flowers ornamented the
bowl like some quaint pattern for Chinese ware. Not a tree nor a living
thing in sight; not a sign that man had ever been an occupant of the
planet, but something that looked like a cigar-box high up the side of
the bowl, and was, in fact, a human habitation. The great blue sky was
set down exactly upon the edge of the dish, like the cover of a tureen,
and there we were, pitifully belittled. The feeling was oppressive. We
had nothing small or mean with which to compare ourselves and _be
somebody_ again, and were glad to have the train back once more,
that we might clamber in and be safe out of the vastness.
On we went till the pleasant little village of Anna was reached. The
country was full of peaches. They ripened and fell beside the roads.
The swine were fattened upon them. The people had just begun to learn
that peaches were money in disguise. The railroad had just taught them
this lesson of finance. It had made Chicago, and Union County peaches
possible combinations. But they were only beginners, and when you asked
a man perched upon a wagon-load of Sunnysides the price, he said, "How
many, stranger?" and when you replied, "A couple of dozen," the answer
came back like the shutting of a jack-knife blade, "Take 'em along an'
welcome!" The locomotive whistled us to quarters, and by-and-by the
speed slackened to eight miles an hour. The windows were garnished with
heads in a twinkling. There was a deer on the track, and bound south,
like ourselves. The engineer crowded him a little, and throwing back
his head, away he went over ties and culverts and little bridges, the
cow-catcher turned into a deer-catcher for the moment. Again the
engineer would let up a little to give the fellow a chance, and so for
miles, till at last, as if he had wings to his heels, he bolted the
track, bounded over a little knoll and was gone.
Now, find that big bowl of ours if you can! Farms checker the prairie.
Villages dot the broad landscape like flocks of sheep. Cities with
mayors to them have sprung up. The locomotive brought the builders,
brought the buildings. In a word, the motive was the _loco_motive.
Take the Chicago & Northwestern Railway across the States of Illinois
and Iowa, across the Rock and the Mississippi to the banks of the
Missouri, four hundred and eighty-eight miles to Council Bluffs. Seven
years ago its western terminus was New Jefferson, Iowa. There you took
private conveyance for a journey of one hundred and eighty miles to the
Missouri. You launched out over the great swells of prairie, rising and
falling, rising and falling, till you almost caught yourself listening
for the wash of the heavy sea. Little hamlets at long intervals showed
like unnamed islets. The wolf looked after you as you passed. The hawks
sat in rows on the telegraph wire over which, that minute, a message
was flashing to California, the little hawks all facing us with their
aquiline countenances, like so many young Romans. The tall prairie
grass waved desolately in the wind. The prairie poultry disputed the
right of way with the advancing horses. The quick tick of the locusts,
all winding their watches at once, sounded loud and clear in the
silence. Dismantled stage barns roofed with prairie hay were sparsely
sprinkled along the route. At last we struck out upon a thirty-mile
stretch without a human habitation. The clouds and the sun played
tricks with the landscape. Now you thought you saw a field of red wheat
ripe for the sickle, and now a scraggy old orchard dwarfed in the
distance. The one was a family of little oaks, the other the long tawny
grass of the prairie slopes.
It was a virgin world. You had escaped from the clank of engines and
the clamor of men. The air swept by without a taint of smoke or any
human naughtiness. Your pulse played with an evener beat. You were not
quite sure you ever wanted to get out of the wilderness at all. You
meet now and then a "freighter," as the ox-expressmen of plain and
prairie are called, with their noisy tongues and explosive whips, and
their four, six, eight yokes of lumbering oxen trailing a yet more
lumbering wagon. Then you come to Ida Grove, with a hospitable tavern
in it. Then fifty miles down the Maple Valley, as unpeopled and
peaceful as the Happy Valley of Rasselas. Seven years ago! And now it
is farms and houses and villages all the way. Churches point their
slender white fingers towards the sky. School-houses hum with the busy
tongues of the disciples of "b, a, ba, k, e, r, ker, baker." Railway
trains go scurrying along. The locomotive has brought the world to the
wilderness, and took back for "return freight" the wilderness to the
world. The old trick of the clouds and the sunshine has been played
again. There _are_ sweeps of ripened grain upon the slopes. There
_are_ orchards that are not oaks.
CHAPTER VI.
PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS.
They have discovered that our next-door neighbor, the moon, is about
the temperature of boiling water. What a splendid locomotive was
spoiled just to make a moon! Those of us who are forty years old have
been spending the last twenty in unlearning much they had persuaded us
to believe in the first ten. No Great African Desert. No Great American
Desert. No giants in Patagonia, except little ones. No William Tell, no
apple, no target practice. "G. Washington" never had a hatchet. No
Maelstrom off the Norwegian coast. No White Nile mystery. Homer never
wrote Homer, nor Ossian Ossian. There are two things, two blessed
doubts, that we know as little about as we ever did, to-wit: Who wrote
the Letters of Junius? and Is there an open Polar Sea? I sincerely hope
they will never find out.
The locomotive is aggressive. It assaults and captures and tames the
wilderness. You are a passenger on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas
Railway, that can swing you down through Missouri and the Indian
Territory and Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. You embark at Sedalia,
the most vigorous inland town in Missouri except Kansas City. The
cars are as elegant as any in America, the track smooth to a wonder,
and altogether the perfection of locomotive civilization. Away you
glide. Fort Scott is passed, and the train begins to show queer
characteristics. The men that get aboard are leaner and longer, with
a swinging stride like so many panthers. They carry brown rifles,
they are girt about with a small armament of revolvers. They are in
full blossom as to the brims of their hats, like sunflowers. They
talk deer, horse, bear, turkey. They brevet you, and you become
captain or colonel by the breath of their mouths, which is tobacco.
There are sleepy-looking dogs in the baggage-car, with ears like
little leather aprons. You see more flat women in sunbonnets than
you ever saw before in one place. Three or four exaggerated creatures
lie in a heap in a corner. They are the half-way station between a
large rabbit and a small donkey. They are ears with bodies to them.
It is your first sight of a buck-rabbit. You hear border talk and
see border manners, in cars finished to the last touch of pier-glass
polish. You look up, and lo, a Cherokee at your elbow! There he stands,
as if a fresh creation, and positively his first appearance anywhere.
His eyes, like black beads suddenly struck with intelligence, had
taken you all in before you saw him at all. You begin to realize
where you are--that old Fort Holmes is at your right and Little Rock
at your left; that you are in a country with such places in it as
Elk City, Panther, Yellville, Crockett and Waxahatchie.
Again, you are on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway. You land
at Emporia, Kansas, one hundred and twenty-eight miles from Kansas
City. The locomotive breasts the prairie in panoply as glittering as
anywhere. You find a brisk and busy town, well-filled stores, elegant
houses, capital schools, a public library, and intelligent and
hospitable people. The railroad was Pharaoh's daughter to it. It found
the little Moses in the bulrushes, and made Emporia a marvel in the
wilderness. You see last week's New York fashions in the streets, the
latest works of literature upon the tables. The pretty dining-room girl
startles your left ear at breakfast with, "Buffalo-steak or antelope?"
You regard her in a dazed way, and ask "What?" "Buffalo-steak or
antelope?" and you say "_Both!_" A citizen, on hospitable thoughts
intent, promises to take you out antelope-hunting. You faintly enquire
"Where?" and the reply is, "O, ten or a dozen miles!" You begin to
understand things, and to see that the locomotive is trailing
civilization along after it wherever it goes.
Again on the train: A man enters the car who toes straight out the way
he is going. He has a red sash, silk, and Chinese at that, about his
waist. The glitter of a silver-mounted revolver at his left side, a
shady sombrero upon his head, an uncivilized nugget of gold for a
breastpin, a small log-chain of the same material a-swing upon his
breast, buttons up and down the side seams of his pantaloons,
square-shouldered, broader at the breast than equatorially. There you
have him, and _isn't_ he cool? He gives you a square look with
both eyes. He seats himself upon the crimson cushions as indifferently
as if he had never seen anything else. It is an American turned into a
Mexican herder, arrayed in his holiday clothes, and bound for St.
Louis. He is at home on horseback, is at home _any_where, and can
throw a lariat like a savage. He takes an apple out of one pocket, a
desperate-looking knife out of another; a little jerk of the wrist, and
about eight inches of steel blade flash out, he looks at you a second,
and--carves his apple! Then that cutlery becomes a toothpick of the
Arkansas patent. He will tell you it is a frog-sticker.
I should like to see the railroad-hog, a variety in the animal kingdom
of which there is something to be said by-and-by, get his seat while he
is in the baggage-car taking a smoke. If carved ox is beef, and
manufactured calf is veal, that hog would be in danger of turning into
pork. Though the herder is quiet, civil, self-reliant, yet he is a
peripatetic Bill of Rights. He is his own Legislature, and the first
law is self-defence. He answers your questions in a quaint, sententious
way. He will tell you that a great herd of those Southwestern cattle
look like a drove of horns with legs and tails to them; that they all
think a man has four feet, and is half horse. They seldom see him
except mounted, and when they do, that man must make "a right smart"
use of the two feet he has left, to escape being gored and trampled to
death. Those illogical cattle have no idea of the concrete. The herder
loves the free life, the swift motion, the abundant air, and the
elbow-room of the plains. He has not taken as much medicine as you can
put on a knife-blade in eight years. When he is "under the weather," he
just curls down somewhere, and sleeps it off like a dog.
Yonder are a couple of rough men, with Northeasterly voices, and shaggy
about the head as a couple of buffaloes. They have just come in from
killing two hundred of those "cattle upon a thousand hills." They
_think_ they are hunters. They are unacquainted with Webster, and
miss the right word, for they are unlicensed _butchers_, and ought
to be punished. They had slain the two hundred for their tongues alone,
and left the great carcasses a reckless waste upon the plains. If those
fellows could only have an Egyptian "lean year" all to themselves, I
should like to put them on a strictly vegetable diet, and turn them out
to graze with Nebuchadnezzar. Such touches of border-life give a Far
Western train a character of its own that is by no means unpleasant.
You feel something as you did when you entered the National
Conservatory at Washington, breathed the scented air of the home-made
tropic and saw the great-leafed palms, and waited a minute for an
elephant to come out.
But let nobody think that the world on wheels in Kansas, Nebraska,
Texas and the Plains essentially differs from the same world trundling
about in New England. Equal courtesy, heartier cordiality, just as much
intelligence as characterize the route from New York to Boston. Writing
of Boston: A certain publishing house in that city once sent a letter
to a Chicago citizen, and a man to bring it, asking for a list of
those places in the West where the people would be "_up_ to their
publications," for that is the way they put it. The Chicago citizen
referred them to a great fat Gazetteer, and the inquisition ended.
CHAPTER VII.
VICIOUS ANIMALS.
A great many animals get on board first-class passenger trains that
should have been shipped in box-cars, with sliding doors on the sides.
There is Your Railway Hog--the man who takes two seats, turns them
_vis-a-vis_, and makes a letter X of himself, so as to keep them
all. Meanwhile, women, old enough to be his mother, pass feebly along
the crowded car, vainly seeking a seat, but he gives a threatening
grunt, and they timidly look the other way. He is generally rotund as
to voice and person, well-fed, but not well-bred. Not always, however.
I have seen a meek-faced man, as thin and pale as an ivory
paper-cutter, who looked as if he had just gone with the consumption,
who made an X of _him_self as if he were the displayed emblem of
porcine starvation. Have you ever thought of taking up burglary for a
livelihood? Be a burglar if you must, but a Railway Hog never! Had the
ancestors of this type of creature only been among the herd that ran
down that "steep place into the sea," what a comfort it would have
been!
Did you ever see the Bouncers? They are young, they are girls, they
always go in pairs, and they bring a breeze. Like the man whose voice
in secret prayer could be heard throughout the neighborhood, they
discuss private affairs in a public manner. They throw scraps of loud,
laughing talk at you much as if they were eating a luncheon. It is
November. The wind comes out of the keen North. Be-shawled, be-cloaked,
be-furred, never laying off fur or feather, they open the windows with
a bounce, and there they sit snug as Russian bears, and the wind
blowing full upon you seated just behind. You venture to beg, after
freezing through, that they will close the windows and let you come to
a thaw. What a word "supercilious" is, to be sure! Up go their two
pairs of eyebrows, and down come the windows, both with a bounce. Then
they grow sultry, and one whisks off "a cloud" or something square in
your eyes, and the other flings back her fur cape on to the top of your
head, sees what she has done, brushes the garment a little, and says
nothing--to you. The train halts at some station. Up go the windows and
out the two heads, and a rattling fire of talk is exchanged with more
Bouncers on the platform--all loud, talk and talkers, as a scarlet vest
and a saffron neck-tie. By-and-by they fall to fixing their back-hair,
smoothing their eyebrows with a licked finger, and making other
preparations to leave the poor company they have managed to get into.
Lest they be forgotten, let me impound certain offending people in a
few paragraphs just here, that, like that place in the Valley of
Hinnom, shall be a sort of Railway Travelers' Tophet. Capital
punishment should not be abolished until they have all been executed
at least _once_:
The man whose salivary glands are the most active part of him, who
spits on your side of the aisle when you are not looking, and spoils
the lady's dress who occupies the seat after him.
The man who puts a pair of feet, guiltless of water as a dromedary's,
upon the back of your seat, and wants you to beg his pardon for being
so near them.
The man who eats Switzer cheese, onions and sausages from over the sea,
in the night time.
The man who prowls from car to car, and leaves the doors wide open in
the winter time.
The boy who pulls the distracted accordion by the tail, he having
several mothers and six small sisters to feed, and then wishes you to
pay him something for "cruelty to animals."
The boy who throws prize packages of imposition at you, and insists you
shall buy the "Banditti of the Prairie," or the "Life of Ellen Jewett,"
or the pictorial edition of the Walworth Family, or a needlebook, or a
bag of popped corn, or some vegetable ivory, and wakes you out of a
pleasant doze to see if you wouldn't like a Railroad guide.
The man who, with a metallic voice, in which brass is as plain as a
brass knuckle, does the wit for the car; who tells the train-boy he'll
get his growth before the train gets through; who talks of stepping off
to pick whortleberries, and then stepping on again; who says that
orders have been issued to the engineer never to heat the water hot
enough to scald anybody; who talks in the night, and makes it hideous.
There is no apparent reason why this man may not be made shorter by a
head immediately. Let him be guillotined. "Brevity is the soul of wit."
What shall we do with her?--the woman who sails through the crowded
car, and brings to beside you like a monument, looks as if you had no
business to be born without her consent, and says in a clear, incisive
voice, that cuts you like a knife, "I know a gentleman when I see him!"
Is there a needle or something in the cushion? You are seventy, and
have the rheumatism. She is twenty-five, full of strength and health,
and with a pair of supporters of her own as sturdy as the legs of a
piano. But what can you do? You feel red, and draw your head into your
coat-collar like a modest and retiring mud-turtle, and pretend not to
hear. But there she stands, and a young fellow across the way with a
sky-blue necktie just lighted under his chin, laughs out loud at the
situation, and you think, as pretty much all the blood you have, has
gone into your head and ears, you will go and warm your feet. So you
get up, with joints creaking like a gate, and hobble to the stove,
where you stand and bow to the stove-pipe in an extraordinary way, and
catch it around the waist now and then, and all the while she sits in
your place like a fallen angel. "What shall we do with her?" Send her
to the tailor to be measured, and "let her pass for a man!"
Everybody has met the man on a railway train who, as no one ever
learned his name because no one ever cared to, may be designated as
"_Might I?_" with a rising slide. All sorts of a man to look at,
he is but one sort of a man to encounter, to-wit: an animated
cork-screw, forever trying to pull the cork from the bottle of
your personal identity. "Might I?" begins his acquaintance by
_stealing_; stealing a look at you out of the tail of his eye, the
meanest kind of pilfering, though the law doesn't mention it. Then he
begins upon you. He says, "Might I ask how far you are traveling? Might
I inquire what business you follow? Might I inquire if you are married?
Might I ask your name?" His talk is as lively as a mite-y cheese, and
he assaults you like the New England Catechism. This man has been
growled at, snapped at, requested to go beyond the possible limit of
frost, but he cuts and comes again the very first opportunity. "Might
I?" has never been put to death by anybody. The remedy could be tried
once, and if it failed to quiet, and only killed him, we should know
better than to try it again.
The Railway Opossum is not vicious but he is amusing. He enters a
car that is rapidly filling, drops into a whole seat, adjusts his
blanket, chucks his soft hat under his head, swings up his feet to
a horizontal--all this in two minutes--and is asleep! Objurgations
fall upon him like the sweet rain. Shakes fail to disturb him, and
no one ever tried Shakespeare. Tender women passing by say, "O, he's
asleep--perhaps worn out with long travel;" and not till that swarm
settles, and he thinks himself sure of his elbow-room, does he open an
eye and "come to," and grow as lively as opossums ever get.
They board the train--they two--he in white gloves, new clothes, and a
white satin necktie; she in a lavender silk, a bridal hat, and a small
blush. Seated, they incline towards each other like the slanting
side-pieces of the letter A. He throws one arm around her, and she
reclines on his shoulder like a lily-pad. They whisper, they giggle,
they talk low, they contemplate each other like a couple of china cats
on a mantle-piece. He takes a gentle pinch of her cheek as if she were
maccaboy, when she is only a very verdant girl. She sits with her hand
in his, like a mourner at a funeral--the funeral of propriety. They
punctuate their twitter of talk with pouncing kisses. They fly at each
other like a brace of humming-birds. The sun shines. The car is filled
with strangers. They are the target for thirty pairs of eyes. They
smell of cologne or patchouly or--musquashes! They are the sorghum of
the honeymoon--saccharine lunatics, and there they are--turned loose
upon the public!
The Union Pacific Company has made provision to shut such people up.
They have just begun to run a lunatic asylum with every San Francisco
train, but they give it an astronomical name. They call it a "honeymoon
car." The Company deserves well of the public for keeping traveling
idiots out of sight. In certain circumstances it is difficult for some
people to avoid being fools.
The ? that wears clothes, and goes away from home by the cars,
and afflicts the conductor and the brakeman and his traveling
companions--he is of recent origin. There is no account of him in Job.
The Patriarch had a great many uncomfortable things, but he didn't have
_him_. Had he been let loose upon Pharaoh, that stiff-necked Egyptian
would have "let the people go" before breakfast. His natural diet is
conductors and brakemen, but he will not refuse anybody. He has told
the man before him and the woman behind him where he wants to go, and
shown his ticket and his trunk check, and asked if this is the right
train, and if the check is good, and when he will get there, and how
far it is, and whether he knows anybody there. His victim pronounces
the check genuine, gets out his "Guide," hunts up the place, ascertains
the distance, tells him the time, and _doesn't_ know anybody there.
The conductor enters, collecting tickets and fare, has a heavy train,
and it is only five miles to the first station. ? makes for him on
sight, tries to get him by the collar or button or elbow, and tells him
where he wants to go, and shows his check, and inquires if this is the
right train, and when he will get there, and how far it is. The
conductor answers him, nips a spiteful nick out of his ticket, and
hurries on. ? returns to his seat, and watches for a brakeman. Him he
catches by the coat-tail, and he asks him if he is on the right train,
and if the check is good, and if he thinks his baggage is aboard, and
when he will get there, and how far it is. The brake-man has seen him
before, and his replies are too short for a weak stomach, but he tells
him.
The last morsel finished, he turns to you, and he says, as a woman who
deliberates and is therefore lost, "I think now I am on the wrong
train. I thought so all the while," and then he tells you where he
wants to go, and shows you his check, and asks you if you think it is
good for the trunk, and how far it is, and when he will get there, and
you tell him. The conductor returns, he makes a grab at him, and he
wants him to tell him when he will get there, and who keeps the best
house, and how far it is from the depot, and whether that is really the
best house or some other, and whether he meant three o'clock in the
forenoon or afternoon, and the conductor doesn't tell him.
CHAPTER VIII.
HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN.
A locomotive has two habits. It drinks and it smokes. It seems to take
comfort in drinking at a liberal river, rather than where the draught
is trickled out to it through a stingy pipe on a dry prairie. Climbing
heavy grades involves hard drinking. On the Mount Washington Railway,
where you travel a mile and rise nineteen hundred feet in an hour and
half, the thirsty engine disposes of eighteen hundred gallons of
water--all dissipated in breath.
During the late war they often watered engines from pails, as they
would ponies. Perhaps you have sat upon a bank, not of thyme but of
time, at midnight, in Tennessee, with suspicious cedars all about
within _hailing_ distance--trees that often shed queer fruit in a
vigorous way--waiting for the train-men to bring locomotive
refreshments of light wood and pails of water. Never since then has the
smoke of an engine been welcome, but often, in those times when the
nights were "unruly," would the burning red cedar load the air with a
suspicion of sweet incense that was really grateful. Possibly it was
associated with the perfume of the cedar bows of boyhood, when the
flight of one's own arrow, sped from the springing wood, was grander
than any flight of eloquence the archer has heard since. To-day, a
whiff of cedar will carry you faster and farther than a swift engine.
It will take almost any half-century-old boy back to the era of
blue-striped trousers and roundabouts, and girls with white pantalettes
gathered at the bottom; to the time when bow and arrow, windmill and
kite, jack-knife, fishhooks and tops, "two old cat," Saturday
afternoons and training-days were so many letters in the alphabet of
happiness, and he will not be a bit worse for the trip, but younger,
gentler and more human.
Writing of boys: till the writer was sixteen years old he never saw a
deacon, that he couldn't tell him as quick as he could a squirrel.
Sometimes they were tall and thin, but often stout, and as the papers
have it, "_prominent_ members of society"--measured from the second
vest button to the small of the back! But they were always gray, and
sometimes venerable. He used to wonder if they were born old, and the
idea of a _young_ deacon was impossible. The locomotive has hurried up
these useful servants of the church, so that they are sometimes picked
before they are quite ripe, and sent forward by an early train. Take a
sleek, dark-haired, flare-vested, civet-scented, slim-waisted man in a
cut-away, and switching his patent-leathers with a ratan, and you have
a deacon that would puzzle Wilderness John, as Agassiz never was
puzzled by a new specimen of natural history. But he may be a capital
deacon for all that, only in disguise.
The more you travel, the less you carry. The novice begins with two
trunks, a valise, a hat-box and an umbrella. He jingles with checks. He
haunts the baggage-car like a "perturbed spirit." He ends with a small
knapsack, an overcoat and a linen duster. Bosom, collar, wristbands, he
does himself up in paper like a curl. He is as clean round the edges as
the margins of a new book.
We throw away a great deal of baggage on the life journey that we
cannot well spare; a young heart, bright recollections of childhood,
friends of the years that are gone. And so we "fly light," but we do
not fly well.
Let us approach the baggage-man with tenderness. Let us tender him
a quarter, if he in turn will give quarter to our trunk. He is
square-built and broad-shouldered. His vigorous exercise in throwing
things has developed his muscles till he projects like a catapult. It
is pleasant to watch his playful ways, provided you carry your baggage
in your hat. He waltzes out a great trunk on its corners till they are
as dog-eared as a school reader. He keeps carpet-bags in the air like a
juggler. While one is going up another is coming down. Hinges of trunks
give way. There is a smell of camphor and paregoric, and a jingle of
glass, and a display of woman's apparel. They are all bundled up like
an armful of fodder, and thrust back into the offending trunk, and a
big word is tumbled in after them--to keep things down.
[Illustration: THE BAGGAGE SMASHER.]
Meanwhile, the tremendous voice of the check-master tolls like a bell,
"4689 Cleveland! 271 Rochester!" and the baggage-car is as lively with
all sorts of baggage as corn in a corn-popper. Things that are marked,
"this side up with care!" come down bottom-side up, like captured
mud-turtles. They go end over end, like acrobats. A rope is stretched
around the place of destruction, to keep the crowd that is watching the
entertainment from being killed. This has always seemed to me a very
touching instance of the loving kindness of railway officials, and yet
it is possible a spare end of that same rope might be used in a
pleasant way to diversify the performances about that baggage-car. They
have--I hope he is yet alive--a model baggage-man on the Chicago,
Burlington & Quincy Railroad. He is very feeble. Once he was the
champion ground-tumbler of the West, but now he has the galloping
consumption. He is a melancholy spectacle, but he is a model of his
kind. The baggage moves quietly about him, and yet the transfer is made
rapidly and on time. There is only one thing that prevents his
promotion--his being made inspector of baggage-men throughout the
country, with a commission to travel and visit them all. It is this:
quick consumption is not contagious. Not one of his subordinates could
possibly catch it.
Sometimes a train in an accountable way has a characteristic. Were you
ever passenger on the Inarticulate Train? The conductor enters the car,
closes the door with a confused bang, and, his little tongs swinging on
a finger in an airy way, he shouts "Tix!" The train-boy coasts along
behind him, and he says, "Ap! Pape! Norangz!" The brakeman pops his
head in at the door, shows you the top of his cap, and roars down into
his manly bosom, "Tledr!" just as you are pulling into that misplaced
Castilian city, in the region where, according to the old song,
"Potatoes they grow small in Maumee!"
The very wheels beneath you trundle along in an indistinct fashion, and
the engine has a wheeze instead of a whistle. It is as if the railway
dictionary had been run over by the cars a number of times, and there
was nothing left for the owners but to serve out the fragments to
passengers. The brakeman of a train holds, all things considered, the
post of honor, because the post of danger. The locomotive talks to him
all day, and, as a rule, that is about the only individual with whom he
holds much conversation. It says "Hold her!" and round goes the wheel.
"Danger!" and he springs to it with a will. "Ease her!" and off comes
the brake with a clank. "Now I'm going to start!" "Now I'm going to
back!" "Off the track! Off the track!" "Coming to bridge!" "I see the
town!" "Open the s-w-i-t-c-h!" and, through all, the brakeman stands by
like a helmsman in a storm. On lightning trains he is not given to much
humor, but the article is in him. As you cross Iowa by the Chicago and
Northwestern Railway, and approach the great Divide, the stations run:
East Side--Tip-Top--West Side. The route through that region is a
little monotonous. It is the hammer, hammer, hammer of the wheels in
anvil cadence hour after hour. Between cat-naps, small enough to be
kittens, you see the great swells of prairie, and then more prairie.
But there is a brakeman on one of the trains that can enliven you a
little, and always brings up a smile like a glimmer of sunshine. He
says "East Side!" or "West Side!" stupidly enough, but when the train
is just halting at the pinnacle, he throws a hearty elation and a
double circumflex into his tone, much as if you had asked him what sort
of time he had at the great Railroad Ball, and he cries "TIP-TOP!"
That inflection of his always tells.
There is a poor joke, past the grace of saltpetre, that an economical
conductor will save a few hundred dollars a year more than his salary;
and there is an impression abroad in many minds that conductors take to
stealing as Dogberry got his reading and writing--naturally. When it
comes to that, a couple of railway directors and a president or two
have been known to steal more money than all the conductors in the
United States together _ever_ misappropriated. A conductor, if
dishonest, is not a rogue because he is a conductor, or a conductor
because he is a rogue. As a class, conductors are as honorable as
lawyers, physicians, bankers, while they run far greater risks, and
have far more to try their patience, than the money-changers and
professional gentlemen just named. Go from Providence to the Golden
Gate, and, as a rule, it is the conductors who treat you with the most
courtesy and kindness, step aside from the line of their official duty
to gratify your reasonable wishes and render you comfortable. And not
for you only, but for the hundreds of thousands of strangers who ride
upon their trains.
To them, generations of men and women only live from eighteen to
twenty-four hours. They pass on, and are seen no more. But during those
hours the conductor has human nature under a microscope. He discovers
things about people that they themselves had only guessed at. He
discerns traits that their neighbors never detected. The average
conductor is a shrewd man. He reads faces like a book, and remembers
them always.
CHAPTER IX.
IN THE SADDLE.
The engineer and the brakeman are as often and as truly heroes as the
average veteran army colonel under fire for the tenth time. True
courage, thoughtful kindness, presence of mind, and a quiet bearing,
form a four-stranded quality that is never quite perfect if unraveled.
How have they all been illustrated! Take the hero of New-Hamburg, on
the Hudson River Road, who looked death in the face, and never left the
saddle. Take the dying engineer immortalized by the poet of Amesbury,
who used the last of his ebbing breath to make sure the coming train
was signalled. Take incidents chinked into the papers every day in
little type, that, pertaining to men without shoulder-straps or title,
are read with a passing glance, and then forgotten.
The locomotive engineer is as quiet as a Quaker meeting. One driver of
a four-horse coach will make more noise than a dozen of him. There he
is with his hand upon the iron lever, and looks forth from his little
window. If he wants to say something confidentially to a street
crossing, there is the bell-tongue. If he wishes to throw a word or two
back to the brakeman, or make a short speech to a distant depot, there
is the whistle. He pats his engine, and calls it "she." Its name is
Whirling Cloud or Rolling Thunder or Vampire or Vanderbilt, but it is
"she" all the time. He knows her ways, and she understands his. He
loves to see her brazen trappings shine; to watch the play of her
polished arms; to let her out on a straight shoot; to make time.
Put your foot in the stirrup and swing yourself aboard. The engineers
little cabin is a regular houdah for an elephant. It is a princely way
of making a royal progress. The engineer bids you take that cushioned
seat by the right-hand window. You hear the gurgle of the engine's
feverish pulse, and the hiss of a whole community of tea-kettles. There
is his steam-clock with its finger on the figure. There is his
time-clock. One says, sixty pounds. The other, forty miles an hour. A
little bell on the wall before him strikes. That was the conductor. He
said "Pull out," and he pulls. The brazen bell, like a goblet wrong
side up, spills out a great clangor. The whistle gives two sharp, quick
notes. The driver swings back the lever. The engine's slender arms
begin to feel slowly in her cylindrical pockets for something they
never find, and never tire of feeling for. Great unwashed fleeces are
counted slowly out from the smoke-stack. The furnace doors open and
shut faster and faster. The faces of the clock dials shine in the
bursts of light like newly-washed school-children's that have been
polished off with a crash towel. The lever is swung a little farther
down. The search for things gets lively. Fleeces are getting plentier.
The coal goes into the furnace and out at the chimney like the beat of
a great black artery. There is a brisk breeze that makes your hair
stream like a comet's.
The locomotive is alive with reserved power. It has a sentient tremor
as it hugs the track, and hurls itself along sixty feet for every tick
of the clock--as if you should walk twenty paces while your heart beats
once! First you get the idea, and next the exhilaration, of power in
motion. It is better than "the Sillery soft and creamy," of Longfellow.
It is finer than sparkling Catawba. It has the touch of wings in it.
You watch the track, and you learn something. You had always supposed
the iron bars were laid in two parallel lines. But you see! It is a
long slender V, tapering to a point in the distance! But the engine
pries them apart as it plunges on, and makes a track of them. The
locomotive quickens your pulse, but it does more. It quickens
vegetation, and makes things light and frisky. See that little bush
squat to the ground, like a hare in her form. It grows before your
eyes. It is a big bush, a little tree, a full-grown maple, that gave
down the sap for the sugar-camp kettle in your grandfathers time. There
are a couple of portly hay-stacks, like two Dutch burghers of the
Knickerbocker days, growing fatter every minute, and waddling out of
the way to let the train go by.
Two miles ago, a strolling farm-house stood in the middle of the road,
staring stupidly down the track. It has just got over the fence into
the lot, behind some shrubs and flowers and pleasant trees, and looks,
as you fly by, as if it had never moved at all. Apparently, really,
always, there is magic in the Locomotive.
There is a picture of the first railroad train in the State of New
York. It was taken by a man with no hands. Their proverbial cunning had
slipped down into his toes. The faces of the passengers are portraits.
One of them is the venerable THURLOW WEED, of New York. The car is
strictly a coach. They call a sixty-soul car a coach now. It is a
vicious misuse, for a railway-car is as much like a coach as a
rope-walk is like a German flute. The vehicle is bodied like a coach,
backed like a coach, doored like a coach, and has a little railing
around the roof to keep the baggage from going overboard. And there is
baggage. It is not a carpet-bag, nor a valise, nor a Saratoga, but a
leather portmanteau, an Old World cloak-carrier. There may be a pair of
flapped saddle-bags under somebody's feet inside. Modern satchels were
not.
There are three seats, and Mr. Weed sits upon the middle one. Before
this coach is the engine. The cylinder is trained like a Washington
gun, at an angle of about thirty-three and a third degrees, and seems
to have gotten the range pretty accurately of the engineer's head. The
engineer has no house, no seat, but stands upon a platform much like a
man about to be hanged. A wine-cask, small at both ends and big in the
middle, is perched on end within easy reach, filled with oven-wood;
to-wit, wood split axe-helve size, such as our fathers were wont to
manufacture for heating the egg-shaped brick oven on baking days. With
this fuel he provokes the patient water to boiling point. No bell, no
whistle, no means of communicating with him, except the conductor
catches him by the coat-skirt.
The conductor is a "captain." He has more dignity than a modern railway
superintendent. They go ten miles an hour, and they do well. Being in
the picture business, I may as well say that the Harpers once presented
a picture of an old-time iron tea-kettle, with a crooked spout and a
jingling lid. I _saw_ it jingle, and that's direct testimony. From
the vexed spout rolled little volumes of steam. Below it was the
portrait of a great locomotive, all ready to run. The twain were
relatives, for the tea-kettle was the shriveled, far away, nasal
grandfather of the engine, and beneath it were the words, "IN THE
BEGINNING." That told the story, as far as the story had gone.
These bits of fine art are suggestive. They mean that we have made
wonderful progress in the art of being common carriers, and that
one-half the world must keep very busy in thinking things and doing
things worth transporting by the other half. It is an axiom that no
city can achieve permanent prosperity simply by an immense carrying
trade. How about the world?
CHAPTER X.
RACING AND PLOWING.
Two rates of motion are racing and plowing, but, as you shall see,
wonderfully alike. An Agricultural Fair has come to mean a Race-Track
with a variety of vegetables ranged around on the outside, and a great
crowd between the ring of track and the ring of vegetables. There
appears to be much doubt as to the propriety of horse-races, but I have
never seen a conscientious man who happened by chance to witness a
race, that did not make up his mind in a minute which horse he wanted
to be the winner. He did not believe in that kind of four-footed
gambling, but then----. You tell him the gray will be whipped--gray is
his color--and he wants to back up his opinion with something--let you
know what that judgment is worth to him; and were it not for some
restraining grace, he would produce his pocketbook and flourish the
estimated value of his opinion full in your face.
That's the way betting comes. It is not a mere invention, like a Yankee
nutmeg. It is human nature. One man argues, another sneers, a third
gets angry, a fourth fights, and a fifth bets. Five ways of doing the
same thing. The writer knew a young man--not so young as he was--who
happened to be in New York when the great running-race between Fashion
and Peytona occurred on the Union Course, Long Island. That individual,
boy and man, never saw but that one race, never played a game of cards,
or bet a penny upon anything; but no sooner were the horses brought up
to the Grand Stand than he had his favorite, and he could not have told
why, to save his life. He would have endowed that horse's prospect of
winning with all his earthly possessions, which were twenty-seven
dollars and a half, if he could have found a taker to accept of such a
trifle. How he watched every jump the creature made! How he admired her
as she flew close to the ground from landing-place to landing-place
again, and clapped his hands and cheered like a maniac! He was a
full-grown sporting-man in a minute, though he did not know a horse's
hock from the Rhenish wine of that name.
Now to put the race upon wheels instead of heels: the tracks of those
two great lines of travel, the Michigan Southern and the Pittsburg &
Fort Wayne, run side by side for several miles after they leave
Chicago--sometimes so near that you can toss an apple from one train
to the other. When the workmen laid the tracks they thought about the
races, for they knew that races must come from such a neighborhood of
railways, and each gang shouted across to the other, and bet on its own
road.
They did come. You are on the Michigan Southern. The train has worked
slowly out of the city on to the open prairie. The Pittsburg train has
done the same thing. There at your right, and half a mile away, you
can see the puffs of white steam. The trembling clangor of the bell has
ceased. The shackly-jointed gait of the train ceases. It tightens up,
and runs with a humming sound. The landscape slips out from under your
feet like a skipping-rope. Pittsburg is coming. She laps the last car
of your train. Now is your time to run alongside, and see how an engine
acts when the throttle-valve is wide open. Watch the flash of that
steel arm as it brings the wheels about. She is doing her best. The two
engines are neck and neck. They scream at each other like Comanches.
The bells clang. The trains are running forty-five miles an hour. It is
a small inspiration.
Now for the passengers. The windows are open. Heads out, handkerchiefs
waving. Everybody alive. Everybody anxious. Nobody afraid. Rivalry has
run away from fear. Our engineer puts on a little more speed. The train
draws slowly out from the even race, like the tube of a telescope. It
is the poetry of motion--power spurning the ground without leaving it.
Good-by, palaces! good-by, coaches! good-bye baggage-cars! good-by,
engine! good-by, _Pittsburg!_ We have shown that train a clean pair of
heels. There is nothing left of it but black and white plumes of steam
and smoke. Look around you. The car is all smiles and congratulations.
"Grave and gay," they are as lively as a nest of winning gamblers.
This racing is all wrong. Superintendents have forbidden it, travelers
have denounced it, but they want to see what can be gotten out of
"Achilles" or "Whirling Thunder," as much as anybody. And they do not
want to be beat! Make them engineers, and every man of them would pull
out and put things through their best paces. We believe in horses, we
believe in locomotives, but we lack faith in balloons. They are large
toys for big children. "The earth hath bubbles as the water has, and
these are of them."
Old Nantucket salts used to spin their fireside yarns about doubling
the Cape. There was such a mingling of peril and excitement; the foamy
seas boarding the ship by the bows; the flying rack; the visible storm;
the orders lost in the thunder of the waves, or swept away by the wind;
it was such man's work to get about that headland in the Pacific seas,
that no wonder boys leaped from bedroom windows in the night and ran
away to try it. I think there is one railway experience you may have,
that is much like going around the Horn.
Did you ever ride on a snow-plow? Not the pet and pony of a thing that
is attached to the front of an engine, sometimes, like a pilot, but a
great two-storied monster of strong timbers, that runs upon wheels of
its own, and that boys run after and stare at, as they would after,
and at, an elephant. You are snow-bound at Buffalo. The Lake Shore
Line is piled with drifts like a surf. Two passenger trains have been
half-buried for twelve hours somewhere in snowy Chautauqua. The storm
howls like a congregation of Arctic bears. But the Superintendent at
Buffalo is determined to release his castaways and clear the road to
Erie. He permits you to be a passenger on the great snow-plow, and
there it is, all ready to drive. Harnessed behind it is a tandem team
of three engines. It does not occur to you that you are going to ride
upon a steam-drill, and so you get aboard.
It is a spacious and timbered room, with one large bull's-eye
window--an overgrown lens. The thing is a sort of Cyclops. There are
ropes and chains and a windlass. There is a bell by which the engineer
of the first engine can signal the plowman, and a cord whereby the
plowman can talk back. There are two sweeps or arms, worked by
machinery on the sides. You ask their use, and the Superintendent
replies, "when, in a violent shock, there is danger of the monster's
upsetting, an arm is put out on one side or the other, to keep the
thing from turning a complete somerset." You get one idea, and an
inkling of another. So you take out your Accident Policy for three
thousand dollars, and examine it. It never mentions battles nor duels
nor snow-plows. It names "public conveyances." _Is_ a snow-plow a
public conveyance? You are inclined to think it is neither that, nor
any other kind that you should trust yourself to, but it is too late
for consideration.
You roll out of Buffalo in the teeth of the wind, and the world is
turned to snow. All goes merrily. The machine strikes little drifts,
and they scurry away in a cloud. The three engines breathe easily, but
by-and-by the earth seems broken into great billows of dazzling white.
The sun comes out of a cloud, and touches it up till it outsilvers
Potosi. Houses lie in the trough of the sea everywhere, and it requires
little imagination to think they are pitching and tossing before your
eyes. The engines' respiration is a little quickened. At last there is
no more road than there is in the Atlantic. A great breaker rises right
in the way. The monster, with you in it, works its way up and feels of
it. It is packed like a ledge of marble. Three whistles! The machine
backs away and keeps backing, as a gymnast runs astern to get sea-room
and momentum for a big jump; as a giant swings aloft a heavy sledge
that it may come down with a heavy blow. One whistle! You have come to
a halt. Three pairs of whistles one after another, and then, putting on
all steam, you make for the drift. The Superintendent locks the door,
you do not quite understand why, and in a second the battle begins. The
machine rocks and creaks in all its joints. There comes a tremendous
shock. The cabin is as dark as midnight. The clouds of flying snow put
out the day. The labored breathing of the locomotives behind you, the
clouds of smoke and steam that wrap you as in a mantle, the noon-day
eclipse of snow, the surging of the ship, the rattling of chains, the
creak of timbers as if the craft were aground, and the sea getting out
of its bed to whelm you altogether, the doubt as to what will come
next--all combine to make a scene of strange excitement for a
land-lubber. You have made some impression upon the breaker, and again
the machine backs for a fair start, and then altogether another plunge
and shock and heavy twilight. And so, from deep cut to deep cut, as if
the season had packed all his winter clothes upon the track, until the
stalled trains are reached and passed, and then with alternate storm
and calm and halt and shock, till the way is cleared to Erie.
It is Sunday afternoon, and Erie--"Mad Anthony Wayne's" old
head-quarters--has donned its Sunday clothes, and turned out by
hundreds to see the great plow come in--its first voyage over the line.
The locomotives set up a crazy scream, and you draw slowly into the
depot. The door opened at last, you clamber down, and gaze up at the
uneasy house in which you have been living. It looks as if an avalanche
had tumbled down upon it--white as an Alpine shoulder. Your first
thought is, gratitude that you have made a landing alive. Your second,
a resolution that if again you ride a hammer, it will not be when three
engines have hold of the handle!
CHAPTER XI.
SNOW-BOUND.
The law of association is a queer piece of legislation. There is the
bit of road that used to extend from Toledo, where it connected with
the steamer, stage and canal packet, to Adrian, Michigan, where stages
took up the broken thread and jolted you on towards sunset. That road
always suggests love-apples to the writer! Love-apples in those days,
tomatoes in these. It was his first ride upon a railroad; and, reaching
Adrian, he for the first time saw and tasted the beautiful fruit that,
according to the newspapers, contains calomel and cancers. Was it a
Persian pig, or some other, that offered a crown jewel for a new dish?
Well, here was a new sensation, as strange as if the fruit that caused
it had grown in Ceylon of "the spicy breezes." The hands that served
them up are dust; the bit of road is lost in the great Lake Shore Line;
the hamlet Adrian, with its log-cabin outposts, has grown a city with
the flare and fashion of the latter day; but in the perishable tomato
the memory of that first ride, that broad, burning August day, those
pleasant friends, is assured forever.
There is the Road to Labrador, known as the Rome, Watertown &
Ogdensburg, that deludes you in winter time from modern Rome, in the
State of New York, and takes you into a world snowed clean of every
fence and vestige of civilization, except houses in white turbans set
waist-deep in the drifts. By-and-by the engine, with strange woodchuck
proclivities, falls to burrowing in a white bank, and there you wait
like a precious metal to be digged out. The wind gives Alaska howls
around the shivering car. The stoves comfort themselves with a quiet
smoke. The passengers scratch eyelet-holes in the frosted panes, and
see hospitable farmhouses within shouting range, but as inaccessible as
if they had been telescopic objects recently discovered in the moon.
The lazy wood is frying with the comforting sound of a speedy meal. The
brakemen stalk to and fro, and slam the doors, and are as talkative as
sphinxes. The women bend around the departed fire like willows around a
grave.
You wish you had Dr. Kane's "Arctic Explorations." A perusal of his
coldest chapter might warm you a little. You get out into the snow, and
flounder along to the engine. There it is, with its nose in the drift
like a setter, and sings as feebly as a tea-kettle. The water drips
through the joints of its harness, and hangs in icicles. Did you ever
see an icicle grow? Now is your time. A drop of water runs down to the
tip of the needle, halts and freezes. Then another, and another. Some
get a little way, and give out. So the icicle grows bigger. Others
manage to reach the point. So the icicle grows longer. It is about the
only vegetable that grows downward, except Spanish moss. The engineer
takes his dinner out of a little tin pail, and eats it before your
eyes. The fireman keeps up the fire, and warms his feet before your
toes. You ask the driver what is going to be done. He suspends the
polishing of a chicken bone for a second, and says, "Waitin' for time!"
Meanwhile the wind has been busy. It has chucked your hat into the
bank, and filled it with snow, Scripture measure.
You go to the rear of the train and look back. You cannot see whence
you came, nor how you ever _did_ come, nor where you will ever get
away. A brakeman starts out with a flag, and plods along the track. He
needn't. There is nothing in the world that can come, and no more
danger of colliding with a train than there is with the Fourth of July.
He has started for the last station, but he is in sight as long as you
can see him, and you could see him longer only it is getting dark.
By-and-by he returns, riding on an engine that catches us by the heels
and drags us back to the station, where the hours put a great deal of
lead in their shoes, and stalk slowly through the night. Two or three
boys come in. They are all of a bigness, like young Esquimaux. They
_are_ Esquimaux. They stand between you and the stove, and stare
at you. Like the moon, only one side of them is ever visible, and that
is the _fore_ side. They are glad there is a storm, glad the train
is stopped. It's fun. One of them has a basket of apples. You buy some.
You might as well try to eat a stalactite. They were frozen coming to
the depot, or before they started, or as soon as they ripened, and you
never knew when. Those boys laugh at your discomfiture, and you hope
there are white bears in Labrador, and that one of them is in a drift
outside with a good appetite, and that he will catch that apple-vender
and empty the basket and eat the boy! By-and-by the first engine gives
a frosty whistle and the second engine gives another, and the conductor
lets his head in at the door and shouts "All aboard!" as if he had been
hindered all this while waiting for you to buy apples and wish for
bears; and the passengers clamber into the car and huddle up, and away
they go.
There is a lecturer on board, an itinerant vender of literary wares. He
is as quiet as a statue, the coolest man in the party, and they are all
half-frozen. At Pulaski, or Mexico, or some other foreign or ancient
town upon that road, an audience awaits him. The Glee Club has sung
itself out. The village boys have burned off their boot-toes on the
red-hot stove. The blessed committee--if the town is large they number
two, but if small, then five--have gone to the depot to catch the
lecturer. He don't come, so they try to strike him with lightning, but
the wire is down and they miss him. The committee return to the hall
and dismiss the hungry ears. The ears level objurgations at the
lecturer--that word "objurgation" always reminds me of a club with a
_knot_ in it--and lift their skirts, and tie down their pantaloons,
and trail themselves home. The train rolls in on muffled wheels at
midnight, and the lecturer in it. But he does not land--not he--but
keeps on to Oswego, where are more ears. During the day he hears from
the committee. They want him to pay for lighting that hall, and making
that fire, and printing those bills, and spoiling their course, and he
pays it, and never more sees the halls of the Montezumas, if it be
Mexico, or shrieks with Campbell's Freedom, "when Kosciusko fell," if
it be Pulaski.
When thus snow-wrecked, there are several ways of getting warm without
fire, though fire is best. And just here comes in that queer law of
association. If reading about Dr. Kane's watch, that he handled with
fur gloves because it was so cold it _burned_ him, will not do,
try Mungo Park toasting to death under an African tree, or fancy
yourself wiping your brow with a dicky in the presence of an admiring
audience, or sitting down upon your new hat in a lady's parlor--if none
of these things will start the circulation, then nothing will do but
fire. That experience of yours in Labrador occurred in early April,
when bluebirds ought to be coming, and the sugar-bush bright with the
camp-fire, and you think of a ride you took in another April long ago,
upon the Memphis & Charleston Railway. You left Stevenson, a hamlet
among the Cumberlands. The train was indigo-blue with soldiers. The
country was wild with alarms. War may kill the husbandman, but it never
halts the Spring. Life is bound to break in green surges along the
woods and brighten the mountains. The air was warm as Northern June.
The sky was soft as a maiden's eye--I don't mean Minerva--the sun
unshorn of a tress of strength. You passed Huntsville, Alabama. You
were in a country lovely as a pleasant dream. The flowers all abroad in
the garden, a touch of gold upon the growing grain, the doors and
windows all set wide open. The swift train, like a shuttle in a loom,
wove the threads of green and blue, and the strands of sunshine, and
the fancy-work of flowers, into one exquisite piece of tapestry, and
laid it along the summer land. Out of the chill of the mountains, you
washed your hands in the blessed air, all tinted and perfumed, and were
glad. You left Nashville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Chicago, behind
you. You are bound for La Crosse. Twenty-four hours ago it was June.
Now it is March. The ground is frosted like a bridal loaf. The pastures
are brown. The woods lift their giant arms in silent waiting.
The engine has run over parallels of latitude as if they were shadows,
but it has done more. It has borne you from summer to winter in a round
day. The stain of ripe strawberries is on your fingers, but your
fingers are in mittens! We are all fashioned to live a great while in a
_little_ while, if we only know how. June and January are nearer
together than any other brace of months in all the year. Show us the
boy who, when he counts his temporal treasures and thinks of the Fourth
of July, does not make a mental dive for his Christmas stocking the
next minute!
CHAPTER XII.
SCALDED TO DEATH.
Steam has ruined a great many things for us, and spoiled much poetry
that was good and true in its time. The songs of the fireside to
myriads are dead songs. What do they know about hearths and hickory, of
backstick and forestick and topstick, and a great, cheerful fire, with
a human smile and a human companionship in it, who camp around an
unilluminated hole in the floor, and feel a gust of hot air like a
simoon? Did you ever sit before a fireplace in a fall night--an
eccentric philologist says that "autumn" is a better word than
"fall"!--with somebody you owned to loving very much; sat an hour
without speaking, and looked into the fire, you and he, you and she,
and yet it seemed to you as if you had been talking all the while? It
was the fire! No couple can sit and think thus around that defective
spot in the floor, and enjoy it, unless they are idiots. Then steam has
ruined the Iambic poetry of the flails, and substituted therefor a
gigantic smut-machine, that runs wild in the field, and puts people's
eyes out, and gives them the consumption, and burns up the wheat stack,
and blows up the engineer. Where is your champion cradler, that went in
with his skeleton fingers and laid out the grain becomingly, after a
Christian fashion? Dead. Steam killed him. And what has become of the
reaper, and Longfellow's, and everybody else's poetry about him? Cut to
pieces with knives, ground fine with wheels.
The clean and blessed fists that kneaded the dough after a pugilistic
fashion in the old days, and moulded it into an eloquent answer to
one of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, have forgotten their
cunning--steamed to death. Enter a Mechanical Bakery. Steam has
bewitched everything. Yonder are three, five, eight barrels of flour
tumbling about in a mass of dough that would crush a district school,
teacher and all. No hands. There are doors opening in the two-story
oven, and cars laden with bread and crackers come rolling out on a
railroad track, and the doors close behind them. No hands. Yonder runs
a train in at an open door. It will stay in the hot chamber twenty
minutes, and come out of its own accord. The engine has burned up the
rolling-pin and the moulding-board, and the big wooden cradle wherein
they kept the dough warm till it "rose" like any other member of the
family; the fork wherewith the blessed biscuits and the mince-pies were
tattooed like New Zealanders is thrown away, and the knife that marked
the old oval shortcakes thus, #, and without which household monogram
shortcakes were _not_ shortcakes, has followed the fork.
When they kindled a fire within the ribs of oak, and sent the steamer
panting around the world, the old tradition of the ship was scalded to
death. No more the tall masts cloud up, as the sky clouds, at the
captain's word of command. No more does the breath of his trumpet roll
up the piles of sails, volume above volume, and the nimble blue-jackets
perched aloft swing themselves along the ratlines, and cling to
nothing, like so many garden-spiders in their webs. It is a mimic storm
of canvas, with Jack-tars instead of angels playing "in the plighted
clouds!" Take a full-rigged ship, showing everything she can carry, and
dressed in her best bunting, and watch her with a glass as she comes up
into the horizon and stands squarely upon the visible sea, courtesying
her way into the harbor like a highborn dame of the olden time! It is
the stateliest thing, so far, of man's making.
Read of the naval battles that went long ago into song and story;
of the great admirals; of Nelson and the rest; of the masterly
manoeuvering of McDonough and Perry and all the dead Commodores that
have made lake and sea memorable, when they spread their great wings
and swooped down upon the enemy like sea-eagles. It is grand to think
of. No machinery below deck grinding away like a mill; nothing aboard
but the capstan, to heave in the cables and bring the anchors home. It
must have been something worth while to float a broad pennant from a
seventy-four, manned with a thousand men! Steam and wheels have
succeeded to the old glories, and when you see a low-quartered
crocodile of a thing, black, unseemly, hugging the water, and with a
dingy-looking drum upon its back, never despise it! There is no
telling what it can do. It is a turreted monitor in an iron jacket,
and carries a gun so preposterously large, that it is not a boat with
a gun in it, but a gun with a boat to it. It rips up your seventy-four
as a rhinoceros an elephant, and sneaks about under the guns
unscathed.
Of guns: those Woolwich infants, as they call them with a sort of grim
facetiousness, that will throw eight hundred pounds of iron seven
miles! As far as you can trot a horse comfortably in an hour. Couldn't
they be used to move an iron-mine from one country to another? These
devices, that steam and wheels are at the bottom of, brought into the
service of Mars and his tomahawk of a sister, Bellona, never seemed to
me so much the square and fair implements of manly warfare, as infernal
machines that ought to be gathered up and packed away in the basement
of John Milton's "Paradise Lost," with their makers just inside the
door to keep watch lest somebody should steal them! Then, again, wheels
are doing their best to trundle an exquisite Scriptural picture out of
fashion. Ships flock not so much "like doves to the windows," as
tremendous forges afloat, with their pillared smokes on high; the very
cloud that came out of the little bottle and took shape, and was the
greatest of the Genii in the Arabian Nights.
CHAPTER XIII.
ALL ABOARD!
A train on the Chicago & Northwestern Road bound for California--a
long, full train--a small world on wheels. Everybody's double is
aboard. The first twenty-four hours settles things. The little bursts
of talk have given out. The great monotone of the wheels sounds over
all. In the second twenty-four the small stock of gossip, brought along
fresh, is consumed with the last crumbs of the home luncheon that was
brought along with it. People begin to show their grain. One man is a
bear. He falls back on the reserves, and sucks his paws for a living,
and _winters_ through the trip. He isn't a playful bruin, but he is
harmless. He entered the car tolerably plump. He leaves it intolerably
lean. He is a Spring bear.
Another falls to devouring books--he eats as a horse eats, incessantly;
he talks as a horse talks, not at all--reads right through States,
Territories and deserts, over rivers, mountains and plains. He might as
well have gone to the Pacific in a tunnel.
See that woman in gray? A dormouse. She sleeps little naps fifty miles
long, several times a day. She is an arrow of a woman--only aims at
what she means to _hit_. A great many people are arrows: they get
through the world with nothing to show for it.
Her neighbor is a knitter. Click, click, go the needles all day long.
She would be glad to "knit up Care's raveled sleeve," or the hose for a
fire-company. Wholesome to look at with her white cap and silver hair,
but no more of a traveling companion than a cat.
Yonder is a motherly old lady, going to see a son in Iowa or Nebraska,
and stay all winter. She lives in a house that has a lean-to and a
great motherly kitchen, where they set the dough down on the hearth in
its big wooden cradle, and make cider apple sauce by the barrel, and
give you good, honest cheer. You can tell all this by her looks.
There's an old-time Eastern grandma. If anybody had told her twenty
years ago she would ever wander beyond the Missouri River, she would
have thought anybody an idiot. The locomotive has done it, and is
whisking her across the continent! She takes snuff. There is a faint
suspicion of "Scotch" on her upper lip. She takes out the shiny black
box from her black silk workbag--the shiny black box with a yellow
picture of Queen Anne, or somebody in a mighty ruff, upon the cover.
She holds that box in her left hand. She takes off the cover and whips
it under the box with her right. She gives the side two little knocks
with a knuckle. The tawny titillative sets itself aright in the box.
There is something in the snuff looking like a discomfited beetle, that
shakes the yellow dust off at her double knock. It is a vanilla bean.
It is a liberal box--liberal as her dear old heart--and holds
seventy-five sneezes! She offers it to everybody within arm's-length. A
true gentleman who abominates snuff takes a dainty pinch with a smile
and a "thank you." So does a genuine lady. But a saucy chit, of modern
make, snuffs contemptuously without taking any, and so does a dashing
sprig of a fellow who never had a grandmother, and deserves none. This
Old-World courtesy over, grandma takes a pinch herself. Watch her. She
touches first this side, then that, in a delicate way, with a thumb and
finger, shuts her eyes, and with two long comforting snuffs disposes
of the allowance. Mrs. James Madison was a lady. So is grandma. Mrs.
James Madison took snuff and displayed two handkerchiefs, one for
preliminaries, and the other, as she herself said, "for polishing off."
So does grandma. One is cotton and blue, and the other is cambric and
white. She sneezes. God bless her! Her life has been as harmless as a
bed of sage, and as wholesome as summer-savory.
_Is_ it a sin to take snuff? Not for grandma. There is no Bible
prohibition for anybody, and not because Sir Walter Raleigh lived a
while after Bible times, either. Neither were there railroads then, but
here is an injunction to railway travelers, in case of accidents, as
old as Hebrew: "_Their strength is in sitting still!_" The writer
saw a man leave a car because it had broken loose from a train, jump
head-first against a wood-pile, and knock his brains out. To make a
cautious statement, he thinks those brains were a severe loss to the
_owner_. The writer has seen a man weighing fourteen stone try to
climb into the hat-rack to get out of harm's way, when the train left
the track. Had the car turned over, there would have been _another_
heavy cerebral calamity.
Yonder is a party of four around a little table. You catch fragments of
talk about "decks" and "right-bowers," as if they were sailors ashore;
"clubs," as if they were policemen; "kings" and "queens," like so many
royalists; "going to Chicago," when they are all bound West; "tricks,"
as if they were conjurors. Then a laugh, somebody says "euchre!" and
the game and the secret are out together. An old man in a home-spun
coat and a puzzled face watches the quartette. It is all Greek to him.
He used to play "old sledge" when he was a boy, on the hay-mow of a
rainy afternoon and nothing to do. The quaint face cards _look_
familiar, but their conduct is inexplicable.
A man needs about as many resources on a long railway journey as
Robinson Crusoe needed on that island of his. He wants a "man Friday"
of some sort. If, like Mark Twain's Holy Land mud-turtles, he cannot
sing himself, he must know how to make others sing. Have you never met
a man who was a sort of _diachylon_ plaster? Who drew you out in
spite of yourself, and put you at your best, till you were not quite
sure what he had been doing to you? That man knows how to travel. Two
prime qualities go to the make-up of a successful tourist: the art of
seeing and the art of listening. If, added to these, he understands the
art of _telling_, then he is a triumph in a locomotive way.
But the wheels are beating the iron bars like a hundred hammers. It is
a November night, and the icy rain drives sharply against the windows.
The out-look is dreary enough. The Argumentative Man--there is almost
always one on board--has gone to sleep. You know him. He's the man
who sits upon the seat in front of you, and overhears you make some
statement to a friend--perhaps doctrinal. Your Argumentative Man is
strong on doctrine. He wheels about on the seat, throws one leg over
the arm, and picks you up. He addresses you as "Neighbor," or
"Stranger,"--possibly "Colonel." If the last, you know whence he comes,
and wish he would make himself the second, and are glad he is not the
first. But he begins upon you. He quotes Paul at you, or Isaiah, or
Genesis, or somebody. He crows over you. He gets upon his hind feet,
and stands in the aisle and raises his voice, and looks around upon the
half-dozen within ear-shot to challenge their admiration when he thinks
he makes a point. He is the man that always lays his argument upon the
thumb-nail of his left hand, leveled like an anvil, and then forges it
every second or two with the thumb-nail of his right hand, and when he
thinks he has you fast just holds one nail on the other a little while,
as if it were _you_ he had finished and was holding there till you
got cool.
That man is exasperating. It is next to impossible to be a Christian
where he is, and very hard to be a decent man. They give penny-royal
tea to bring out the measles. He is a decoction of _human_
penny-royal, and brings to the surface all the ill humors there are in
you. Sometimes your Argumentative Man is a clergyman, sometimes a
layman, but you wish the train was a ship bound for Tarshish, and the
Man's name was Jonah, and a convenient whale alongside, though you are
sorry for the whale--but then we are all selfish, if we are _not_
whales! But the Man is asleep, and the knitting-work put away, and the
cards have had their last shuffle, and grandma is dreaming of home, and
ever so many more are gazing up at the car lights in a stupid way, or
looking out through the blank windows at--nothing. The man with the
black bottle is low-spirited, so is the bottle, and he has settled his
head down between his shoulders--shut up like a telescope. It is all
dull and stupid enough.
There are two women seated together, plain women, say forty-five or
fifty years old. They have good, open, friendly faces. Plainly dressed,
modest, and silent save when they conversed with each other, you had
hardly noticed them. Perhaps there was the least touch of rural life
about them. They would make capital country aunts to visit in
mid-summer, or mid-winter for that matter. If they were mothers at all,
they were good ones. So much you see, if you know how.
Well, it was wearing on towards twelve o'clock--the reader is requested
to believe that this is no fancy sketch--when through the dull silence
there rose a voice as clear and mellow and flexible as a girl's, of the
quality that goes to the heart like the greeting of a true friend. It
belonged to one of those women. She sat with her white face, a little
seamed with time and trouble, turned neither to the right nor the left,
seemingly unconscious that she had a listener. They were the old songs
she sang--the most of them,--songs of the conference and the camp--such
as the sweet young Methodists, and Baptists withal, with their hair
combed back, used to sing in the years that are gone.
First it was
"Rock of Ages! cleft for me,"
and then,
"Our days are gliding swiftly on."
The clear tones grew rounder and sweeter. Those that were awake
listened; those that were asleep awoke all around her. Some left their
seats and came nearer, but she never noticed them. A brakeman, who had
not heard a "psalm tune" since his mother led him to church by the hand
when he was a little boy, and who was rattling the stove as if he were
fighting a chained maniac, laid down the poker and stood still.
Then it was:
"A charge to keep I have,"
and so hymn after hymn, until at last she struck up:
"I will sing you a song of that Beautiful Land,
The far-away home of the soul,
Where no storms ever beat on the glittering strand,
While the years of eternity roll.
"O, that home of the soul in my visions and dreams
Its bright jasper walls I can see,
And I fancy but dimly the veil intervenes
Between that fair city and me."
The car was a wakeful hush long before she had ended; it was as if a
beautiful spirit were floating through the air. None that heard will
ever forget. Philip Phillips can never bring that "home of the soul"
any nearer to anybody. And never, I think, was quite so sweet a voice
lifted in the storm of a November night on the rolling plains of Iowa.
It is a year ago. The singer's name, home and destination no one
learned, but the thought of one listener follows her with an
affectionate interest. Is she living? Surely singing, wherever she is.
I bid her Godspeed. She charmed and cheered the November gloom with
carols of the Celestial City. She passed with the full dawn of the
coming morning out of our lives, and there is a strange ache at the
heart as we think so. Whoever heard her that night could write her
epitaph. They could say--they could write:
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF THE
WOMAN WITH THE SONGS
IN THE NIGHT.
CHAPTER XIV.
EARLY AND LATE.
Swift motion is the passion of the age. See a picture, see a statue,
see a poem, the question _is_, How long did it take to do it? The
press that does an old-fashioned month's work in thirty minutes; the
method by which the engraver's patient labor, with skill in every touch
of the burin, for a weary week, is counterfeited in fifteen minutes;
the sewing-machine that kills one woman and does the work of twenty
more, running up a seam like a squirrel up a limb; the railroad train
that can stitch two distant places the most closely together--such are
the things that kindle enthusiasm.
Did you ever see a man who had not ridden a mile a minute, or who did
not think he had? ("A mile a minute" is a bit of flippant talk, like
the man's who declared of a certain Fourth of July that he had seen a
hundred better celebrations.) I never did, except two. One of them had
never seen a locomotive, and the other conscientiously thought he went
a _lit-tle_ short of fifty-nine. A mile a minute has considerable
meaning. It implies a velocity of eighty-eight feet in a second. It
would keep a train ahead, or at least abreast, of a brisk gale, so that
there would be no wind at all. It wouldn't disturb your front hair, my
girl, if you stood on the rear platform, and played Lot's wife by
looking over your shoulder. It couldn't catch you--at least it couldn't
fan you--for it is a spanking gale that makes sixty miles an hour in
harness.
But everybody has gone a mile a minute by the cars. The writer has
tried to tell a number of people several times that _he_ had; that
between New-Buffalo and Michigan City, on the Michigan Central Road,
and one of the noblest and best-officered thoroughfares in the land,
he did go five miles in a minute apiece; and he went on explaining
that the track was straight as an arrow and smooth as glass, so that
his auditors might believe it and wonder over it, and they all, one
after another, rose and declared that they had gone a mile a minute,
and not one of them as few miles as a paltry five! Were you ever
standing on the deck of a sailing-craft, with a brisk breeze blowing,
when all at once it fell to a dead calm, or went about so that your
face was swashed with the wet canvas, and your hat knocked overboard?
The writer was that unfortunate navigator. So now he contents himself
with telling that, years ago, he rode on a train of the old Toledo &
Adrian Railway--strap-rail at that, where they had just half spikes
enough, and pulled them out after the train passed, and drove them
into the other end of the bars, to be ready for the engine when it
returned--rode twelve miles an hour--a mile every five minutes; that
it was good time, and everybody was proud of it. All of which was true.
His auditors are all silent. He has the track; for if one of them ever
rode any more slowly, he is ashamed to let anybody know it!
But there has not been the wonderful increase of speed on railways that
we are led to think. Thus, thirteen years ago last May--1860--at the
time of the Chicago Convention, the train bearing the Eastern delegates
ran from Toledo to Chicago, over the Michigan Southern Road, two
hundred and forty-three miles, in five hours and fifty minutes,--forty
and a half miles an hour. It ran a match race with a train on the
Michigan Central, and reached Chicago twenty-five minutes ahead. It was
a great day for the late John D. Campbell, the Superintendent of the
winning road, when, standing on the steps of the Sherman House in
Chicago, he introduced the Superintendent and passengers of the belated
Central to the crowd brought by the Southern, that were there awaiting
them. Poor Campbell! he has gone to the silent terminus of all earthly
lines. Not long ago, Mr. Vanderbilt and party made a trip from St.
Louis to Toledo, the engines doing their best. The distance is four
hundred and thirty-two miles, the rate forty and one-tenth miles an
hour, the actual running forty-five and a half--an average not
decidedly favorable to continued health or remarkable length of days.
Locomotives never cultivate the grace of patience, though we should
naturally think they would. The more engines there are to puff _for_
us, the more _we_ puff. We chafe at a detention of thirty minutes more
than our grandfathers did, of thirty days. You know the man that
always wants to go faster? Of the twin luxuries of high civilization,
grumbling and the gallows, he enjoys grumbling best. His watch in one
hand, his Guide in the other, and neither right, he compares the
whereabouts of the one with the time of the other. He vows we are
not going fifteen miles an hour when the rate is twenty-five if it
is a rod. His chronic mania is to "_connect_." He didn't "connect"
yesterday, nor the day before, nor any other day, and he never will
"connect" again as long as he lives. He isn't willing the engine should
have a billet of wood or a drop of water. In fact, he is opposed to the
train stopping at all, to let anybody off or on, until he has ridden
out the last inch of his ticket. Denouncing collisions, he hopes that
train Number One--_his_ train is always Number One--will not wait a
minute for Number Two, that is plunging on towards him upon a single
track like a Devil's-darning-needle. "Haven't we got the right of way?"
and that settles it.
The fellow has lost the _escapement_ out of his mental watch-works, and
he runs down as quick as you wind him up. Take him to pieces, and you
will find he has none. Years ago, one of the staunch old Lake steamers
made the quickest trip from Buffalo to Chicago then on the record of
locomotion. Its passengers took a last look of New York and a first
look of Chicago a little nearer together than anybody ever did before.
The writer happened to be on the dock at Chicago when the steamer was
nearing it. "Forward," was a man with a carpet-bag in his hand. He was
a rusty man, as if he had been lost like a pocket-knife, and somebody
had accidentally dug him up. He was trying to get over the guards
somewhere, so as to jump ashore before the steamer "made a landing." He
acted like an unruly steer trying to find a low place in the fence.
Now, as it proved, he was the same man you always see in the cars, who
wants to go faster. He had come from a Schoharie County Hollow, where
the sun never rises till eight o'clock and goes to bed two hours before
night. He had driven a yoke of ruminants and hoof-dividers since
childhood. He was going out West to see an uncle who did not know that
he was coming, and would not have cared a straw if he _had_ known. He
had made the quickest voyage on record, but he was the original man who
wants to go faster.
From the sacred to the profane is, as the world reads, like turning
over a leaf in a book. Admiral Blake, a rough but noble old sea-dog,
who used to take his steamer safely through as dirty weather as ever
slopped a deck, saw this man, and, albeit not the president of any
institution of learning, conferred the degree upon him then and there
of D.D., the two letters being kept at a proper distance by a dash, and
he gave him a name that could hardly have been his father's. It was the
short word that Mr. Froude threw at the New York reporter's head when
he asked the historian how he pronounced his name: "Like double o in
fool, sir." The old Admiral's profanity is thus left scattered through
this sentence in a fragmentary condition. It is hardly worth while to
pick it up and adjust it.
Only this: I never could see the piety of printing an oath with a
_dash_ in it. The wolf's scalp is all you need to have to get the
bounty. To impale an oath upon a straight stick neither hurts the oath
nor helps the swearer. It is profanity by _brevet_, and ought to be
banished from the realm of type. If a man wants to write "infernal,"
and he should not want to write it unless it is proper, let him letter
it squarely out i-n-f-e-r-n-a-l, instead of sneaking into print with
the head and tail of it--in-f-n-l.
There used to be a picture that presented the funny side of the man
who is always a little late. It showed a railway train rolling grandly
out, the fleeces of smoke dotting the route on the air above it. Behind,
at the distance of an eighth of a mile, and losing ground every minute,
as you knew by his looks, was a man, his long hair and his short
coat-skirt leveled away behind him like the two horizontals of the
letter ~F~. He was after the train; he had been left, and those
railroad ties flew out from under his feet at a lively rate. The engine
enjoyed it, and the artist helped to give expression to the creature's
satisfaction, for on every volume of smoke and steam, in letters
constantly growing smaller and feebler as the clouds rolled farther and
farther away, like a faint cry in the distance, he had written the words
"I'VE GOT YOUR TRUNK!"
"I've got your trunk!"
"I've got your trunk!"
"I've got your trunk!"
You could hear that jolly and saucy locomotive say every word of it.
[Illustration: A LITTLE LATE!]
The man who lets himself loose to pursue a train is a public
benefactor. Everybody is pleased with the performance--but the
performer. The loungers on the platform at the station encourage him
with shouts that put "spurs in the sides of his intent." The engineer
leans out at his window and lets the engine whistle for him, and
sometimes slackens a little, just by way of delusive encouragement. The
brakeman on the rear platform seems to be putting on the brakes with
might and main, to hold the train for him to catch it. Passengers
beckon to him, and wave him on with hand and handkerchief. When he lags
a little, the observers cheer him, and he dashes on in prodigious
bursts of speed. Boys whirl up their hats and bet he'll win. But his
heart begins to kick like an unruly colt, and he comes to a halt and
stands like a mile-post and stares after the receding train. Then he
turns and, mopping his face with his handkerchief, walks slowly over
the course. He does not seem anxious to reach the depot, although by
the laughing of the crowd he knows they are all glad to see him coming.
He can count more teeth than he ever saw at one time, except in a
Saginaw gang-saw mill. But he seems to shrink in a modest way from the
greeting he is so sure of.
Now there were Christians in that crowd. There must have been. There
were in Sodom. There are everywhere except among the Modocs. But I am
afraid there was not a Christian on that train or about that station
that in his secret heart wanted that man to catch the cars--that could
have prayed for the achievement, no matter what depended upon it, and
kept his countenance.
CHAPTER XV.
DEAD HEADS.
"D. H." Everybody knows what D. H. is. He sees it on the telegram that
costs him nothing. He sees it in the glass when he looks at himself, if
he rides free upon the train--Dead Head. It never had a pleasant sound,
and lately it has grown almost opprobrious. In the beginning, the
courtesy of a pass was extended to the drivers of the quill. The editor
and his family and his wife's mother and the pressman and the devil all
rode scot-free.
Then State Lycurguses _en masse_ with their families and their
mothers-in-law, members of every house of Congress, all kinds of
Judges, all people that were "their Excellencies," or "Honorables,"
_very_ rich men that could buy a couple of hundred miles of the
road and not mind it, and last, clergymen. These were classed with
children under eight years old, for they went at half-fare--rode one
half mile for nothing and paid for the other half. The ground of this
fractional manifestation of grace is debatable. Possibly it was
poverty, and if poverty, then to the shame of the churches that
received the earnest and incessant labors of men, and then sent them
out begging for a living. It is a hard, ugly word, but it is the true
one.
At length when, upon a single line of road, six thousand people were
all riding at once fare-free as a flock of pigeons; and when people who
held "complimentaries" were asked to hold their tongues when they ought
to tell the truth, and shut their eyes when they ought to keep them
open; and when editors began to discover that their passes made them
about the cheapest commodities in the market, and that, by reason of
the bit of pasteboard, they were doing more work for less money than
anybody else in America, then there began to be a lull in the
pass-system. Railroad Companies had spasms of resolutions that they
would confer the degree of D. H. upon nobody. That was incredible, for
when a railroad finds it for its _interest_ to issue a pass, you
may believe the pass will be forthcoming without a pang. But the
clergymen's half-loaf always seemed to me a sort of half-handed charity
that should have been resented, in a Christian way, instead of being
accepted. That, to-day, they generally recognize the fact that the
people who do not pay them should furnish their tickets, instead of the
people who never heard of them till they produced their credentials in
order to be numbered with the infants, is a more truthful and manful
view of the situation.
There are D. H.'s beyond the meaning of the railways. There was a
church in Otsego County, N.Y., with as many brains and as much
grace in it as in any country church of its time. It had a
minister, faithful, able, earnest, who preached out-and-out and
through-and-through Bible sermons. He was not a "star-preacher." He
knew little about astronomy save the Star of Bethlehem. That man
preached forty years for that church, and they never paid him a dollar.
They made "bees," and drew up his winter's wood, and cut his grain.
That was all.
Well, he was gathered to his fathers, but he had spoiled the church. He
had educated it to be D. H. without knowing it. After he died, the
deacons went looking about for a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar minister,
and you can get about as much minister for that price as you can get
psalm-tune out of a file. Finally they tried five hundred dollars'
worth. It was a cheap article they got. It was hard to hear him preach,
but harder for them to pay him for it. They had been deplorably
educated. They were Dead-Heads.
Their church edifice stands to-day on a hill, like the Celestial City,
but it is a very dilapidated one. If you go there any summer Sunday,
you shall find it untenanted save by the fowls of the air. They had a
funeral there last season, for Death opens the old building sometimes,
and on a window-ledge near where the gray-haired singers used to strike
up "Mear" and "Corinth" and old "China," a mother-bird--a robin--sat
undisturbed upon her nest. The good old Elder's grave across the road
is sunken and weed-grown. "So runs the world away."
Writing of churches: By a sort of common consent, Modocs seem to be
excepted from any general plan of salvation but the _Quaker_ plan.
The writer once went as far West as the railroad could carry him, and
then took the bare ground into Nebraska till he struck the Indian
country, and found a Mission twenty years old in the wilderness. It is
probable that very few of them deserved baptizing, but they all wanted
washing. Having heard the little Indians sing hymns, you went about a
mile and saw where they had buried a horse, that the dead brave might
make a good appearance on the Happy Hunting Grounds, which they thought
he would reach in about fourteen days.
You saw red-ochre fellows who were well up in the three R's--"reading,
'riting and 'rithmetic"--who had slipped back into the old burrows as
naturally as woodchucks. You saw one young man, tolerably educated, who
had served in the Federal army, and served well, sunning himself on the
turfed slope of a summer wigwam. All that was left of his civilization
was the tatters of a pair of blue pantaloons. He had slipped back into
his blanket, and felt as much at home in it as a fawn in his spots,
though the comparison is greatly damaging to the fawn. You ask him
about this advance backwards, and he says, "'Mong white folks nothin'
but _Ingen_. 'Mong Ingen _nobody_--come back tribe be good Ingen as
any." And you have the situation clearly stated for your consideration.
You ask the missionary how many of the tribe he counts as Christian.
He enumerates, and you wish to see one. He points him out, a
villainous-looking old fellow with a lowering eye, and the most of his
head packed like a knapsack behind his ears, and you think a little
preliminary hewing and scoring would hardly come amiss to make him a
safe man to meet in the night-time, and trim him down to Christian
proportions. Say, with a hatchet, hew to a line commencing just in
front of his organ of self-esteem, and make a clean sweep of things
to a point just back of his ears. There would then be a better
organization to begin upon. After that, Robert Raike's recipe, plenty
of water with soap in it, would be in order. Then try catechisms.
Catch an Indian young, and something may be made of him if he doesn't
get away, but an old Indian is a tough creature to tame. You felt like
asking the missionary if, this man being a Christian, there were many
_sinners_ near by. If so, it seemed prudent to get back to the
railroad without standing very particularly upon "the order of your
going."
CHAPTER XVI.
WORKING "BY THE DAY."
Something is written elsewhere of the graveyard luncheons they took in
the Sunday noonings. Those were the times when the minister worked by
the day. The Sunday school in the morning, for the lambs led off the
flock. Then a hymn on both sides of the threshold of prayer, and a
little carpet of Scripture laid down before it. The preacher would read
the hymn, and say, "Sing five verses;" and if he did not happen to put
up the bars in this way across the narrow lane of praise, the choir
were bound to sing it through, if it was as long as "The Ancient
Mariner." Then the sermon, wherein there was a world of scoring and
hewing, and showers of chips that hit people here and there, and the
work was laid out generally. Then another hymn, the prayer and the
benediction. This took till high noon. Then afternoon, wherein the
morning's frame was put together, mortise and tenon each adjusted in
its own place, raised, roofed and sided, and a doctrine or so put into
it to keep house.
The afternoon was the forenoon over again, except that the grandest of
all mere human breaths of praise, the Doxology, was sung, and "the
disciples went out." The congregation always stood when the clergyman
called upon the name of the Lord; and sometimes he called a long time,
and occasionally a feeble body, and now and then a lazy one, went down
like a forest before a mighty wind! Is there any becoming posture in
public prayer between kneeling and standing? Is it not either the one
extreme or the other? To see a congregation with their heads every way,
like a field of barley after a hail-storm, does not inspire a sentiment
of reverence; but a people rising to their feet as one man is an
impressive act of homage. Then the Bible class was chinked in somewhere
between songs and sermons, and the conference-meeting came in the
evening, and held till nine o'clock. For a day of rest, the
old-fashioned Sunday was about as busy as a meadow full of hands with
the hay down and a storm coming!
Once in four weeks was covenant-meeting. It occurred on Saturday
afternoons, began at one, and lasted till four or five. The little boys
of good people in the writer's childhood had to go to covenant-meeting.
The writer's parents were good people, and _he_ went. The reader
is requested to remember that Saturday afternoon was the old-time
holiday--the only day in the week when the small animal, man, could
kick up its heels with the halter off. There is no recollection more
vivid and more painful than of those tremendous Saturday afternoons. I
had heard of Joshua, and I couldn't persuade myself that he was dead,
though I wickedly hoped he was, for somebody must have commanded the
sun "to stand still," and it obeyed.
The laugh of the children of the perverse generation came faintly and
sweetly from the neighboring orchard. The rays of the sun streamed
aslant through the still air of the church like the visible ladder of
glory, but not to the restless eyes that watched, but only the token of
the expended day, and no other to be had till the last of next week. It
was the later covenant the church members were renewing, but the old
covenant made by the Lord with Noah would have been far preferable.
There was something beautiful to look at about that--the seal of the
covenant--the Bow of Seven. As it seems, now, there was a blunder
somewhere.
There was nothing upon wheels in that church. The shepherd stayed by
his flock till his hair silvered, and his deacons were as gray as he.
No clergyman was on wheels but the Methodist. Had the gauge been right,
and had there been railroads, it would have been convenient to have
casters attached to the boots of the clergymen of that faith and order,
for so they could be trundled away at will like pieces of heavy
furniture!
There was a time when people put on their slippers, took a night-lamp,
bade each other good night, and went up stairs to bed. Those people now
go to bed by railway. They think nothing of fifty miles between
counting-room and bedroom. They die out of the city every evening, and
are born into it with newness of life every morning. It is a good
thing. They live more, and they live longer, if the engine behaves
itself; but when it gets a notion to pass a sister engine on a single
track, or to try the bare ground, like a horse with his shoes off, that
kicks up its heels in the pasture, or to climb aboard the train and be
a passenger itself, perhaps the bedroom may be a few miles too far
away, and the old geography be best.
There was a time when we kept our dead about us; in sight of the church
windows where folks went in the Sunday noons to eat their luncheon, and
leaned against gray slabs and read the dim-lettered records of the
hamlet's forefathers, and talked about the sermon and the--crops. They
had observed that things kept growing on Sundays, and they mentioned
it! If not in sight of the church windows, then just in the edge of the
village, a pleasant stroll after tea, where old people walked and
looked grave, and young people sat and talked low, not so much about
the mute Miltons or the village Hampdens, as an article, or so they
fancied, situated somewhere under the left half of their jackets and
bodices. Now, from "sanitary" considerations--I think that is the
word--they have located the cemetery so far away that you must buy a
ticket to reach it. When first they began to hurry the dead to the
grave at the rate of thirty miles an hour, it _did_ give the
old-time sense of the proprieties a little wrench, but it was not an
outright fracture of anything, and so the proprieties were long ago
convalescent.
CHAPTER XVII.
A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER.
The Railroad is a slanderer. It maligns cities. With few exceptions it
_sneaks_ into town; enters it by the cheapest end, as politicians
say of candidates, the most "available" way. By-the-by, is the
"available" aspirant for office always the cheapest? It comes in by
people's backdoors; it sees mops swinging like "banners on the outer
wall;" it overlooks hen-houses; it flanks pig-pens; it manufactures
dead ducks and gone geese; it commands barnyards. Take La Porte, on the
Lake Shore Railroad--one of the most beautiful little cities in the
whole West, _nothing_ excepted. Its streets are pictures. Its
shade is luxuriant. Its lakes are lovely as any classic water that ever
inspired a poet's song. Ask the world that flits by on the Lake Shore,
and never halts at all, about La Porte, and it says, a straggling
Hoosier village, out at the elbows and the heels withal, fringed with
shanties, mopsticks and swill-pails. And on he plunges in his
ignorance, knowing as little of the Gem of the Prairie as if he had
been born, like a Mammoth Cave fish, without any eyes at all. The
Michigan Central and the Illinois Central Roads, in their approach to
Chicago, are splendid exceptions. Running on the water side and out at
sea, if you please, they pass along the city front, with its stately
structures, its spires and towers, as if it were a magnificent
painting. By night, when garlanded with lights, it is as gorgeous as
some Eastern queen arrayed in all her jewels.
There are in America at least six hundred and forty railroads, without
counting the branches. Of the latter there are hundreds, and it is
curious to observe how certain trunk roads resemble trees in putting
out their branches and getting their growth. Thus the iron arms of the
Michigan Central spread like a larch, the Chicago & Northwestern like a
fern, while the Hudson River takes a straight shoot as limbless as a
liberty-pole. We are apt to crowd the rhetoric sometimes, and say that
railroads have taken America, and the continent is as full of fibres of
iron as an oak leaf is of fibres of wood. I saw a letter the other day
written by a Bishop of the Episcopal Church from his home here in
America. That letter traveled a thousand miles before it struck a
railroad! His diocese is in the Hudson's Bay Company's country, and is
no dooryard diocese either, for it is larger than many empires.
But the locomotive ventures into improbable places for all that. Think
of a ponderous engine, fashioned to grind miles under its wheels like a
grist in a mill, being drawn, as one was a short time ago, under the
Arch of Constantine at Rome, along the very road whereon the robe of
Cicero trailed, if he didn't lift it, and the weak-eyed poet strolled!
Classic ground or Holy ground, it stands a poor chance with the
locomotive, for with the steam comes the newsboy, the boot-black,
modern slang, irreverence, and--peanuts.
No piece of mechanism has affected so widely, diversely and powerfully,
the globe and its inhabitants, as the locomotive. That a railroad
should influence the weather is the very last thing that would be
suspected, but it must plead guilty to the charge, for in certain
regions it is almost _climatarchic_--a presider over climate. That
being the only _hard_ word used, the offence should be easily forgiven.
Let some recording angel, like Uncle Toby's, be found to drop a tear
upon it, if need be, and blot it out.
Everybody knows how the rains have descended and the floods come in
regions of the continent and in seasons where and when little ever fell
but dew. Number the facts from Utah to California that are being washed
down into human understandings by heavy showers. There is no danger of
our being claimed by Sydney Smith's genuine Mrs. Partington, if we say
that somehow--and we are not bound to tell how--the railroad brings
rain. Would it not be wonderful if that brace of iron bars across the
continent should literally interpret the pleasant Scripture, "And the
desert shall blossom as the rose"? And it looks like it. The old
devices for artificial irrigation are growing useless, and territory
hitherto unproductive, is beginning to do something for man. And this,
not because of the pioneers to whom the railroad has made the desert
possible and accessible, but because of its direct influence upon the
climate. Rain-clouds west of the Rockies, that have never spoken a
loud word within the memory of man, are now talking as audibly and
emphatically as if thunder had been their mother-tongue from babyhood,
and rank vegetation is springing where nothing was ever before sown but
fire.
The vast system of iron net-work and the hair-lines of telegraphy,
about enough to make a snare to catch the planet, have disturbed the
electrical equilibrium, and the results are seen in the new and novel
phenomena of thunder and shower. By the way, did you ever know any part
of a train to be struck by lightning? There are three or four accounts
on record of such an occurrence, but the testimony is doubtful and
obscure. Running in what are generally deemed the most dangerous
places, along the tall fences of telegraph-poles, so often shattered by
lightning, and throwing up such volumes of heat, smoke and steam, all
of which are supposed to be favorite thoroughfares of the mysterious
agent, it seems strange that, if our scientific facts are facts at all,
many accidents by lightning do not occur upon the railway. But the
direction of the bolt is determined before it leaves the cloud, and a
train is nothing but a slender thread trailed along the earth's
surface. What the locomotive will yet do for all kinds of man--mechanic,
agricultural, scientific, moral--is an unsolved problem! A glance at
the initial chapter of its history assures us that it will be as
marvelous in the future as it was unlooked for in the past.
CHAPTER XVIII.
DREAMING ON THE CARS.
When a man travels, what material baggage he takes is _im_material, but
he leaves behind him a great deal of mental and moral _impedimenta_.
There used to be a saying among the traders to Santa Fé, "If there is
any dog in a man he will show it out on the trail." During the war,
people going to the front were astonished to learn what manner of
people some of their nearest neighbors really were. It is so in the
world on wheels. Men and women show out wonderfully. But whatever you
put on to go a-journeying, even to that new silk hat, if you must,
never put on _airs_. They are altogether too gauzy to be warm in
winter, or decent in summer. Many a woman has told you, without
intending it, that the entertainment she regarded with such measureless
contempt is better than anything she ever encountered at home. Clothes
have become transparent as window-glass. They utterly fail as a
disguise.
You grow conscious on a railway train, as nowhere else, what trifles go
to make up the warp and woof of life. Thus, you catch yourself watching
an old-fashioned man with an ancient hat that was beaver in its time.
He takes it off and holds it in his hand. You wonder how it has come to
look so like its owner. It has a character, and the character is the
man's. Then the heavy roll of his coat-collar, with a padded look,
reminds you of the picture of George the First, the Last, and the
All-the-Time, to-wit: George Washington. You think G. W.'s face is much
like a tin lantern with no holes in it to let out the light, and about
as--is it profanity, or _what_ is it?--about as _stupid_ a face as
there is going. To be sure, it has a solid look, and so has a round of
beef.
You look up just then, and, yonder in the corner facing you, sits a man
of sixty, frosty, Octoberish, square face, double chin, hair long and
curly, pleasant eyes, all surmounted by a broad-brimmed hat. You start
at the resemblance; it is as much like Benjamin Franklin, printer, as
one picture is like another.
Then you wonder what that lady over across the aisle is trying to get
out of that bottle with a knitting-needle. You watch, and she spears
away until she brings out a little pickle. You notice a couple
whispering and giggling, and making objects of themselves generally,
and you marvel why, when young married people travel in the cars by
sunlight, they don't let the honeymoon set, or change, or something.
The train stops at a station among the pines--you are on a Wisconsin
road--and little girls come to your window with small clusters of
wintergreen berries, set off with a few glossy leaves. You buy a fresh
woodsy taste of spring, and then follow the girls away to their humble
homes among the sand-hills, and fancy how they live and what they hope.
The train halts at a station in Maryland--you are on the train from
Washington to New York--and dusky boys and maidens, born on the shady
side of humanity, swarm around with neat little paper-boxes, with
a layer of fried oysters looking as light and frisky as your
grandmother's fritters. The ivory smiles are very pleasant to see, and
before you know it you are humming "Way down in Alabama," and sorrowing
that some of the sweetest melodies in the world since the daughters of
Judah hung their harps on the willows, should have dropped out of
fashion like lead down a shot-tower, and wondering what poet, what
historian, will yet preserve the legends and songs of the days of the
Old Plantation. Then you wander away to Holy Land, and consider what
punishment should be meted out to the man who has just been telling
us--and wants to be thanked for it!--that the trees those Jewish Girls
hung their harps on--those sweet-voiced girls, with the blue-black
hair--were not willows at all, but _poplars_! Old-fashioned people
call them "popples." Fancy a singer hanging her harp on a popple! Then,
there is now and then a lady who has a sort of petroleum-fortune
refinement, who speaks of a poplar-tree as a "popular," much as if she
should fancy that engineer is a sort of corruption of _indianeer_.
All these things are dreadful, but a popple-hung harp is worse.
The train pulls up at a station in Virginia, and a barefoot girl
approaches you with flowers to sell--fragrant Magnolias, and the most
graceful and grateful offering of all, and you fall to thinking if
anything so beautiful will ever be named after you, as this magnolia
was, after that Professor Magnol. Happy Magnol! The flowers should
grace his tablet in the fairest of white marble. Now you pass through
the apple region of New York, and the chestnut woods of Ohio. You know
both, by the swarms of small Buckeyes bearing chestnuts, and the bits
of Excelsiors loaded with Greenings and Baldwins.
Then you fall to watching the man with the new silk hat. Every body
does. It is not an irritated hat, for it shines like a bottle. He
bought it yesterday, and is going a thousand miles immediately. The
head seems to have been made just to have some handy place to put the
hat. That hat thus put comes into the car. Its support is seated,
carefully applies a thumb and finger to both sides of the brim, and
lifts it perpendicularly off, much as if his ears ran up into the top
of it, and he would lift it away without touching their tips. He looks
at it. It caught a little bump as he entered the car, and there is the
mark. He smooths it with a finger in a sorrowful way, reaches up, and
puts it in the rack _crown_ down. Then he settles to the journey,
thinks again, elongates, and puts that hat _brim_ down. This satisfies
him.
In a few minutes he rises, gives that castor another turn, as if it
were a kaleidoscope and he bound to have one peep more, and deposits
it upon its side. At the instant he is about to let go of it the car
gives a frolicsome lurch, and that hat catches a jam. He withdraws it
tenderly, and there is the scar. It _looks_ like the kick of a
vicious horse, but it _is_ the work of an ass to wear such a thing
on a journey. What sort of a figure would Moses have cut with a silk
hat, in the last years--say the thirty-eighth of them--of his
Wilderness wanderings? Well, the man whips out his handkerchief, and
allays the irritation of the angry hat. He applies his tongue to it as
if for some healing quality, claps it upon his head, and, wearied with
physical exertion and mental anxiety, falls asleep. He is _not_
Jupiter, but he resembles him, for he "nods," and that unhappy tile
tumbles, strikes the back of the seat with the _thrum_ of a feeble
tambourine, and bounds sepulchrally along the floor. A man puts his
foot upon it in his haste to be neighborly, and "when the man with it"
recovers the unlucky bit of head-gear, it looks like a short-joint of
stove pipe that somebody has wildly hammered and wickedly sworn at
because it would neither go inside nor outside. But the man with the
new silk hat never falters. He carries a head to put the hat on. He
carries a hat-box to put the hat in. He makes a right angle of himself,
and sets his hat right side down upon his lap, as if about to play an
endless game of "pin." You saw him yesterday. There is "an eternal
fitness in things," even in _hats_.
They used to tell--in old times more than now--of "presenting the
freedom" of this and that, London or Amsterdam, or what not, to
somebody "in a gold box." That is not the ceremony in later days. They
present you "the freedom" of the world on wheels, if you can pay for
the _ticket_. On a California-bound train you met a lady. Not to
indulge in any pleasant euphemism, she was a half century old, but then
she was strong and womanly, and apparently no nearer death than when
she was handed about in long-clothes. She was the mother of men. She
was the wife of an English physician and botanist; I should say
"scientist," but if there is a mean word in the language, it is that
same "scientist." It reminds me of nothing but a thin, offensive bug,
that has been subjected to the pressure of a vindictive thumb-nail.
She was unattended. She had a ticket that shut over and over like a
Japanese book. It was good from London to--New Zealand! Across two
oceans, Atlantic and Pacific; across the American continent. She was
bound home. She ate strawberries, she said, with her husband and "the
boys," just before she left New Zealand. She ate strawberries with her
sister at the parting meal in London; and, as she smilingly added, "I
shall be in time for strawberries and cream at San Francisco."
No more nervous anxiety about the lady borne on wheels around the
globe, than if she had been walking under the palms in her Australasian
home. You could not help thinking, as you regarded her pleasant face,
of the Malay of the old Geography dressed in a towel, amidst a far-away
and inaccessible scene of tropic luxuriance, only to be found after
months of tossing by sea and perils by land, of cannibals and beasts of
prey; and here she was, going directly there to her charming English
home in the South Pacific seas, with that crown-jewel of the firmament,
the Southern Cross, in sight. How pitifully shriveled, like a last
year's filbert, is Tom Moore's little song about the Irish Norah, who
went on foot and alone around the Emerald Isle unharmed--
"On she went, and her maiden smile
In safety lighted her round the Green Isle"--
beside the tremendous arc of circumnavigation the Doctor's wife was
describing without a flutter!
So all these trifles beguile the way, keep the mental watch from
running down in your pocket, until the brakeman earns his supper by
telling you where you can earn yours, as he shouts through the car,
"Twenty minutes for supper!"
CHAPTER XIX.
"MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT."
There were two steamers on Lake Erie that were twins. They were, in
their time, and not so long ago, models of steamboat architecture;
elegant as palaces, and in every respect as nearly alike as builders
and artists could make them. Their names were _Northern Indiana_
and _Southern Michigan_. The writer and "his next best friend"
took passage upon one of them bound East. It was a mid-summer night.
The moon at the full, and her ladyship did what all poets, since moons
and poets were, have said she did--made day, "only a little paler" and
lovelier, and what not. The steamer was running her sister's trip, that
sister having met with an accident. The damage being repaired, it was
proposed that, when the twins met on this voyage, the passengers should
be transferred from each to the other, the sisters wheel about and
retrace the wake they had just made, and so the advertised trips for
the season would come all true again.
The sea was as nearly a sea of glass as it ever is. The moon rode high
in the heavens. It was just midnight when we saw the sister coming,
decked with white and colored lights alow and aloft, like a queen of
"the barbaric East" in all her jewelry. The lights from two stories of
windows streamed out upon the air. The music of the band was heard. It
looked like a city adrift, and beautiful and airy as a dream. Our deck
was thronged with passengers, who saw themselves in the approaching
apparition as _others_ saw them. They were looking upon the steamer's
counterpart and double.
The two neared each other, came alongside in the middle of the sea, the
planks were put out fore and aft, and the transfer of passengers and
baggage began. There were two steady currents of human life meeting and
passing on the gangway. Age, youth, beauty, fashion, wealth, poverty.
Bright lamps shone all around, and the moon over all. People looked in
each other's eyes, glanced at each other's faces, as they met for an
instant, sometimes gravely, sometimes with a smile, that nevermore in
all this world would meet again. Now and then a pleasant word was
uttered between strangers, but generally the two processions were
silent, almost thoughtful. It was a scene at once beautiful and
impressive. The occupants of State Room B in the _Northern Indiana_
found themselves occupants of B again in the _Southern Michigan_. The
passengers in the upper cabin of the one found all unchanged in the
upper cabin of the other. "The places that once knew them should know
them no more forever." The transfer was effected with less confusion
than in a congregation leaving a church. The bells rang a parting
chime. The steamers wheeled, each upon her own route. We had died out
of one world into another. It was a picture of life and of death on the
moonlit sea. Such as it was, can I ever forget it?
The memory of the first steamer you ever saw comes dimly out, like a
smoky old picture. Let us say it was the steamer _Nile_, with a
bronze-faced old sea-dog for captain; the steamer _Nile_, with two
gold crocodiles on the bow for a figure-head; the steamer _Nile_
at her dock in Buffalo, and "up" for the City of the Straits. The rush
of crowds and steam, the farm-wagons laden with household gods and
goods that were backed over the broad gangway; the shy country horses
that were pulled and pushed aboard; the Mrs. John Rogerses, "carrying
one for every ten" by the old rule of addition; the score of sheep,
frightened out of their little wits, huddled together forward; the
sailors coiling lines and chains; the close, dim cabins lined with
berths; "the walking-beam" working slowly up and down; the faint, hot
smell of steam and oil; the wheezy way with the machinery; the little
leaks of steam and water here and there that snuffed and hissed, above
and below, as if everything about the craft were alive and generally
uneasy.
Then came the clang of the bell and the voice of the first mate, "All
ashore that's going!" The captain in position on the hurricane deck; a
tinkle of bells in the engine-room; the rasp of the lines the sailors
pull in with a will; a general jail delivery of steam; leviathan moves;
she is off; the flags unroll to the wind; the band on deck strikes up
"Charley over the Water;" the great crowd of men and women and horses
and drays upon the deck gets the size of a swarm of bees on an
apple-tree limb; then a mere handful of hornets; then out of sight.
Every time the wheels come about, the boat shakes as Cæsar shook with
that Spanish fever of his, when he called Titinius; up stairs and down
stairs an incessant rumbling and tumbling that make things jingle. You
are fairly at sea; the air is fresh and clear, as if just made. The
_Nile_ was a grand affair in her day, but as Egyptian as the New
York Tombs. She laid her bones on the Michigan beach one terrible
night; and her old commander, ill ashore, lived just long enough to
hear of it.
Who were aboard? Elder Alfred Bennett, for one--not Reverend, nor yet
New Jersey Bishop--but _Elder_ Bennett, with a head like Humboldt's,
and holding more of celestial geography than the great Baron knew of
earthly--a lion of the tribe of Judah. Of all titles for Baptist
clergymen, "minister" seems to me the simplest and most suggestive. It
associates them with "the ministering spirits" of whom we read, and
whom we believe in. Take a young fellow from Hamilton or Rochester, who
never tarried six weeks at Jericho, and call him Elder, as his country
brethren and sisters always will, and there is an amusing incongruity
about it, as if the old proverb, "the child is father of the man," had
come literally true, and the downy Elder's father were a little boy
somewhere, about big enough to figure in the Millennial group of the
leopard and the lamb.
Father Bennett was bound for Michigan. He would see that accomplished
Christian gentleman, Dr. Comstock. He would see that noble preacher and
large-hearted man, Rev. John I. Fulton; he would see Elder Powell, one
of the Thirteen who gave a dollar apiece, and so founded Madison
University. He would return to Utica, and meet that admirable Editor,
Dr. A. M. Beebee, of the New York "_Baptist Register_;" in youth,
office-mate with Washington Irving, the man of Sunnyside; in manhood,
the thorough, consistent, able Christian editor. He would consult with
Dr. Nathaniel Kendrick, that giant in the churches; with Professor
Hascall, who took Madison University into an upper chamber, as the
disciples gathered, and kept it till its name was strong enough to go
abroad, and was worked for and prayed for all at once, as the "Ham.
Lit. and Theo. Sem." Elders Card and Cook would come down to meet him
from the North Woods; Elders Galusha and Moore and Hartshorn from the
West. They would all attend some Association together, and Elder John
Peck, as clean-hearted as an angel, always had a word to say. He was
one of the great noble provocatives to good works, and had he never
achieved anything himself but that, the "well done, good and faithful
servant!" would have been the verdict. But Elder Peck never _could_
say "Association." You can shut your eyes and hear him: "the brethren
of the _As-so-sa-shun_ will please to give their attention." All
these--Elder Powell, perhaps, excepted--have gone away to the Great
Convention of the church triumphant.
Are people's memories getting shorter? Does anybody remember how Dr.
Kendrick used to begin one of his old heart-of-oak sermons? How he
towered up behind the low pulpit, like a Lombardy poplar behind a
fence? How that two-story head of his reminded you of the portrait
of Oberlin! The first words came slowly and ponderously. Those
silver-rimmed spectacles shone around his eyes. He laid out his work by
the day, and not by the job. He told you of "the damning demerit of
sin." He climbed rugged Sinai like a stout mountaineer. By-and-by away
went the spectacles. He warmed and softened to the work. His words came
fast. He descended Sinai and went away to Gethsemane. And when he was
through, and occasionally it took him a long time, you felt that you
had heard a man of remarkable power, who had yet a store of it in
reserve--a man who could handle the doctrinal sledge with one hand, and
never strain a muscle.
Dr. Kendrick, like many of that class of old divines--as witness Dr.
Backus, of Hamilton College--had a world of ready wit, that flashed out
unexpectedly from the soberest of mouths. One day of the dead days, the
Doctor was conducting a class in Moral Philosophy, and he asked a
student if a man could tell a lie to a brute. The student _thought_
not, and so put his foot in it and _said_ "not." "Once," said the
Doctor, in his deliberate way, "I visited a ministering brother in the
western part of this State. In the morning he took a halter, and went
into the pasture to catch his horse. He hollowed an empty hand and
extended it. The horse pricked up his ears at the prospect, came up,
thrust his nose into the barren hand and was captured. Some time after,
I was called to sit in council in that same region. The minister
alluded to stood charged with having made misrepresentations to his
fellow-men. I am sorry to say the allegations were proved true. _I_ had
seen him practice deception upon a quadruped. _They_ had heard him tell
a falsehood to a biped. Now," added the Doctor, "were the two acts
alike, or did the hind legs of the quadruped kick out the brains of the
intent?" The class laughed, but the student didn't say!
CHAPTER XX.
THE MAKER OF CITIES.
No matter how carefully you freight a train, there is always something
gets on board that never appears on the bill of lading. Day after day
you see Alexandrine caravans pounding away to Iowa, burdened with
Michigan forests that sawmills have laughed over in their rough, coarse
way. It is called lumber, but it _is_ a county capital, a whole
village, a happy home. Score out with the double bars of the railroad
a broad page of the open book of the fertile wilderness, sink a
well somewhere that the engine can halt to drink, and a shanty,
weather-beaten as a wasp's nest, will come down in a few days over the
roll of the prairie, and treat itself to some new clap-boards and a
coat of paint white as a sepulchre, and there it will stand close
beside the track to see the cars go by.
Soon, another will creep up from the bushy run and range itself
alongside, and ten to one that it will shout at you in monstrous pica
lettered along its whole front, METROPOLITAN HOTEL! You have always
observed that the smaller the inn the bigger the title, much after the
fashion of the naturalists who "call names," and denominate a harmless
little chimney-swallow an Hirundo Pelasgia! Then more houses, a church
with a chuckle-headed belfry, a school-house, a store, all white as
this week's washing. Then one money-purse of a mail-bag will be thrown
off from a passing train upon the depot platform, and another handed on
as easily as a woman's work-pocket.
The village is christened Athens, it has a P.M., and when a little
village grows to have a P.M., it is getting pretty well along towards
A.M. Day has fairly broke. Untilled breadths of prairie round about
begin to show scars. The plow is busy. They set out trees, and settle a
minister and hire a schoolma'am. They fit up a hall over a store, and
call it Apollo. A man comes along with a composing-stick in his pocket
and starts a newspaper. It is the _Clarion_. The editor thanks one
man for a pumpkin and measures it. He confesses to a turkey and
acknowledges the corn. He says he is amazed at the great West. A young
lawyer gets off the cars, and immediately another. A solitary lawyer is
useless. What would Robinson Crusoe have done had he been an attorney?
His story would have been _brief_, and no red tape to tie it with.
No, a couple of lawyers are like two halves of a pair of shears. You
need them both for the cutting purposes of the legal instrument. Two
doctors are there already. Then an artist arrives with his house on
wheels, and backs it upon a vacant lot next to the "Metropolitan," and
there it is, with a monstrous lobster-like eye in the top, and the
girls and their "fellows" come in from around about to be taken--come
in their best; great healthy girls, wearing three or four dresses
apiece, each shorter than the other, and all flounced, or fluted, or
something.
The railway has brought the fashions. It also brought that Chinese
abomination, a gong. The "Metropolitan" has one, and it frightened an
innocent man into running away with a span of horses, and they never
got him. It also threw a feeble woman into convulsions who had been
reading Gordon's Adventures in Africa--not the "lord" of that ilk. She
either thought it was a lion or she was in Africa, but she never
explained. The rival hotel, called "The Orient," because it is located
in the Occident, and completed yesterday, has not attained to gongs. It
only rings a bell.
A barber arrives. His fathers, some of them, were from the coast of
Guinea. He is table-waiter at the Metropolitan. Likewise an artist on
leather, with dramatic tendencies, for he strikes an attitude and
cries, "What boots it!" and then laughs like a general alarm in a
poultry-yard. He is ostler at the Metropolitan, also porter. He
punishes a fiddle for the dancers at the Apollo. He shaves.
The Methodists came first. They have a choir with a pitch-pipe to it.
Next the Baptists, with a melodeon. They both will try for an organ
next year. THE EXAMINER has a club bigger than can be cut anywhere
within four miles of Athens.
And this Athens is as much the product of the locomotive as a puff of
steam. It made things possible. The next thing the prince of modern
genii does, is to bolt the track without tumbling into the ditch. It
goes across-lots to some sleepy little ante-railroad Corners, that was
the county-seat aforetime, and trails the Court-house, by a figure of
speech, back to Athens, and it becomes the Capital! All the boys are
aching to do something whereby they may get into the new jail. At last
the Sheriff catches a rogue and locks him up, and the boys are
satisfied. The thin lawyer with the thin tin sign becomes Judge, and
also fatter. It was a graveyard they had over at the Corners, a
straggling place where people lay down wherever they pleased, and
nobody said a word. Things are not thus in Athens. They have laid out
a--cemetery, with some pretension to beauty, and have traced it off
with paths and avenues like the lines upon the palm of a hand. They
also have a hearse. So has the Corners, but then Athens has _plumes_,
when people die that can afford it.
There are a briskness of step and a precision of speech about the
people of a railway creation that you never find in a town that is only
accessible to a stage-driver, and where they go sauntering about like a
Connecticut one-horse chaise. There it is always three o'clock till it
is four. In Athens never. From the depot with its time-table to the
dusky factotum of the "Metropolitan," everybody carries a watch. He
compares it with the standard at the depot once a day. He consults it
upon all possible occasions. If you begin to preach, he times you from
the text. If you marry him to somebody, he whips out his repeater, and
sees just how long you were about it. The second-hand, so useless in a
lazy old town, is magnified in importance to a crowbar. You ask him the
time, and he tells you "Number Six, due here at two o'clock and one
minute, has just gone. I'm thirty seconds slow. It's two o'clock and
four minutes!" And there you have the time almost accurate enough for
an astronomer. The locomotive is an accomplished educator. It teaches
everybody that virtue of princes we call punctuality. It waits for
nobody. It demonstrates what a useful creature a minute is in the
economy of things.
The West is full of Athenses that were. They have grown greater and
better. They star the prairies as constellations the heavens. They have
grown more modest and less pretentious with time. Villages, like girls,
have "a hateful age." There is a period, too, in the life of villages,
when they resemble that red-nightcapped carpenter, the woodpecker--they
are biggest when first hatched.
CHAPTER XXI.
A CABOOSE RIDE.
Has it ever happened to you to be left somewhere, and nothing to get
away upon but a freight train? And did the train happen to be running
on an Express train's time, and did you make the flitting in the night?
If "yes," you remember it. The writer was at Friendship, in the State
of New York. It adjoins the town of Amity, whose post-office ought to
be Fraternity. What a dreadful thing this "calling names" has become!
Down that same Erie Road is Scio, and not a man of them can tell where
Homer was buried. Then we have Cuba and Castile, and nothing Spanish
or Castilian in either of them, except the Castile _soap_ at the
druggist's. Avon, without Shakspeare; Caledonia, and nobody to bless
the Duke of Argyle for a scratching-post; Warsaw, that Campbell does
not sing of in his "Pleasures of Hope;" Ararat, and no sign of Noah's
ark; Waterloo, that Bonaparte never lost; Cato, Ovid, Camillus,
Marcellus, and all the rest of them.
To return to the freight train: You climb aboard, and entering the
caboose sit down before you mean to, the thing giving a plunge just
before you are ready. Four or five men are disposed about the car. They
are drovers. You think you have blundered into a barnyard. Those men
have their outdoor voices with them. Their frequent conversations with
herds have made them boisterous and breezy as the month of March. The
society of cattle is not always refining, especially of cattle to kill.
You don't see anybody reading poetry. The stove burns wood, and not
coal, but the car is smutty for all that. They use many good words, but
they don't seem to understand the _arrangement_ of them. You begin
to be sorry you did not tarry at Jericho for the passenger train. But
these men are kind-hearted. One of them moves along and lets you sit
within six inches of the stove that, unless like a blackberry, it is
red when it is green, must be dead ripe.
The car is a short caboose, fashioned like a small, ill-shaped back
kitchen, and it has no more wheels than a one-horse wagon, which gives
it an uneasy and suggestive way on the track. A brakeman sits with his
head swung out at a window. The conductor sits with his watch in his
hand. Nobody has any business there at all. The engineer is doing his
best to make a distant station, and get upon the side-track before the
Express wants the road. You find this out by degrees. It makes you feel
light, but not airy. The kitchen rocks like a cradle for a dozen rods,
and then jounces the light out and the water-barrel over and your hat
off, and the stove rattles like a smithy in a driving time. Then it
gathers itself up like a salient goat, and bounces against the bumper
of the next car and something snaps. No matter.
The train swings around a curve, and you feel as you did years ago when
you were the last boy on the string in the game of "snap the whip." You
steady your lower jaw a little, and ask the conductor if he is going to
stop before he stops for good, to-wit: meets the Express, and he says,
"Genesee!" It occurs to you that he has mentioned the very place you
are bound for, though you never heard of it before. The conductor
informs you it is safe to bet we are "just dusting," and you believe
him--the _only_ safe thing about the train. It is thirty miles an
hour. Another head is hung out of a window, and you think you'll try to
count fence-posts. It doesn't happen to be a fence, but a stockade; and
as for telegraph-poles, you have seldom observed them thicker to the
mile. You look forward, and see lights down the track. Drawing in like
a turtle, you tell the conductor. "What is it, Joe?" and the brakeman
replies "Nothin'." The conductor puts his watch to his ear. Has it
stopped? With rattle and roar the engineer keeps launching the train
into the midnight. A shrill shriek of the locomotive whistles you up,
and you are on your feet like a cat. The brakeman runs up his little
iron ladder, the speed slackens, the train comes to a dead halt. It is
Genesee, and one grateful passenger leaves that frantic caboose, to set
foot in it, as he fervently prays, "nevermore."
CHAPTER XXII.
HATCHING OUT A WOMAN.
When the necromancer turns farmer, sows a few kernels of wheat in a
little tin-box of earth, claps on the cover, sends a few sparks of
electricity through it, whips off the lid and shows you the green
blades an inch and a half long, in a minute and a half, it is a
phenomenon, but not a miracle. You can see something quite as marvelous
in the World on Wheels any day. Enter a well-filled car in "the wee
small hours ayont the twal." The light is dim but not religious with
the uncertain glimmer of candles or the smoky flare of kerosene, which
ought to be banished from every civilized and Christian road. The seats
are heaped with shapeless piles of clothes. Folks are shut up like
jack-knives or bagged like game. Here and there a head is visible,
swaying about when there isn't any wind, as if everything had "lodged"
except a bearded stalk now and then. By-and-by the gray, cold,
unspeculative dawn begins to show at the East windows, and there is a
stir among the bundles. A man with hair over his front like a Shetland
pony's mane emerges from a blanket. A boy with the head of a distaff
changes ends. A girl blossoms out in the next seat.
But there is one large heap of clothes that you watch, and they are
good ones. A dainty hat with a feather in it swings from the rack above
by one string. A muff like a well-to-do cat reposes in the wire manger.
The bundle appears to be composed of cloaks, shawls, and a lap-robe. It
is _shaped_ like an egg, and it _is_ an egg. First one shawl gives a
little lift, then another. There is a slight surge of a cloak. Off goes
a shawl. A snug gaiter with a foot in it emerges at one end, and a
disheveled head at the other. Forth comes a hand, and at last the
chrysalis is rent, and the occupant is hatched out before your eyes.
But it is anything but a butterfly. It is a crumpled, drowsy piece of
womanhood, who slept in her head but not in her hair.
The trying, pitiless light of early morning plays upon her
terrifically, and she knows it. It amuses you to watch her under your
eyelids. She brings forth from her reticule a liver-shaped device, and
she hangs it on behind, like the fender of a canal-boat, just over her
combativeness and philo-progenitiveness, and what not. Then she
arranges and sorts out curls and ringlets for different organs. You
ought to see that head. It grows like a soap-bubble. She claps a love
of a friz on her self-esteem, which allies her to angels; a coil of
curl upon her firmness, which brings her, sometimes, within neighborly
distance of donkeys; she borders her brow with ringlets, trails a braid
about her inhabitiveness and constructiveness, touches up the tress on
her veneration, and the head is artistically complete. She washes her
face with a handkerchief, rights her collar, shakes out the creases,
tosses the little hat upon the top of all things, and is ready for
breakfast. Who talks of necromantic _wheat_, when here is a human
_flower_ hatched from an awkward bundle in less than thirty minutes!
When you take a train with a _harem_ in it--I use the word in its
originally clean sense--and you have no _personal_ interest in the
harem, you are apt to fare badly. The train is meant where the women
are sorted out for one car, and what is left is just turned into
another. It is a vicious fashion, and fosters the art of lying. There
goes a young man at the heels of a lady whom he never saw before, or
spoke to in his life, and he is carrying a spick-and-span new bandbox.
My word for it, it is as empty as a church contribution-box on Saturday
afternoon. He bought that box for precisely that emergency. The lady
ascends the platform. So does the bandbox. The brakeman opens the door,
and the young man slips in unquestioned, and secures a comfortable
seat. He means to study for the ministry, and he has been lying by
bandbox!
There is another man. He appears to be a good man. You are sure he is,
and he stands where the brakeman can see him, and touches his hat to a
window of the harem where nobody is sitting, and then, with a little
smiling affectionate haste, he skips up the steps and says, "Please let
me in a minute!" and in he goes. That unfortunate man never beheld a
face in that car in all his life. The more you think of it the more
vicious the fashion seems. It does not benefit the ribbons, and is a
positive damage to the whiskers. Pen men up together, and if they do
not act like cattle it will be in spite of the pen! Women sprinkled
through the cars keep the train upon its honor, if not upon the track,
and elevate the lumbering thing from a common carrier to an educator.
Flying bedrooms are among the crowning achievements of railway travel.
They are gorgeous. They remind you--the most of them--of the Hall of
Representatives at Washington, which in its turn suggests a Chinese
pagoda. They are luxuries. If you don't mind plunging endwards through
your dreams at forty miles an hour; and if you don't care whom you
sleep with; and if you never catch cold; and if you have no "reasonable
doubt" as to getting out, provided the bed-room is mistaken for a
dice-box, some night, and you are sure you will not come within an ace
of throwing the deuce, there is nothing like them. Snores in many
languages are let loose upon you, and feet from many boots. The porter
has an appetite for boots. He sits up at night to get yours, no matter
where you put them, and there he is in the morning, the boots in one
hand and nothing in the other. It is pleasant, also, to have the
drapery of your couch whisked one side every few minutes, just as you
have dropped off into a doze, and a strange hand passed over your face,
by somebody blundering about in quest of his berth.
Flying drawing-rooms _deserve_ what winged bed-rooms _need_--unmitigated
praise. The clank of wheels is shut out. You exult to the angles of
your elbows, because there is room for them. You can go about in your
revolving chair like a shingle chanticleer upon a barn-ridge. You read
quietly, write comfortably, converse easily. It is home adrift.
CHAPTER XXIII.
A FLANK MOVEMENT.
In war and peace all people are afraid of a flank movement. General
Sherman, though he never quite found out what newspapers are for, _did_
discover that the Federal strength was in the enemy's flanks. In other
words, if the Confederate army had been finished off prematurely like a
pictorial cherub, he would have had nothing to punish. It is said to be
a dreadful strain upon a man's muscles to kick at nothing! In a railway
car a man is apt to be flanked by somebody--a small army of observation
in the rear.
Take a man who has a fine sense of feeling all over, and put two women
behind him--one woman thus located is comparatively harmless, but two
are a terror, for they can talk about you!--and he begins to wonder if
his collar is clean behind, and how he looks just back of his ears, and
whether a stray string, or something, may not be sticking up above his
coat, though he cannot remember that he ever had anything there to be
_tied_. Then he tries to remember whether he brushed his hair neatly
behind, in his haste this morning, lest he should be behind himself.
Just at that minute there is a coincidence; a little laugh from the
ladies on the next seat, and footsteps on the rim of his ear! It is
mid-winter, and it cannot be a fly. If he were only sure it was a
tarantula, he would be happy. They laugh again, and again that small
promenader. He _knows_ his head harbors nothing but ideas, and yet
a trespasser may have come from foreign pastures, for all that. He
wishes he knew--that he could see himself as "ithers see" him at that
particular minute.
Can it possibly be of the race that Burns discovered upon the woman's
Sunday bonnet? He dares not put his hand up, lest they should observe
it. He feels his ears grow red and warm. He wishes they would get hot
enough to scorch that creature's feet. Still those small footsteps. He
has heard, in his time, the tramp of armed men. It was sublimer, but
not half so terrible. Again that little laugh behind him, and rising in
his desperation he goes to the rear of the car, claps his hand to the
burning ear, and secures a single hair like a bit of a watch-spring,
that had coiled on the rim of the human sea-shell, and counterfeited
feet that his fancy built upon, as Agassiz built two-story monsters out
of a rafter or a rib that somebody exhumed and sent to him. And those
ladies had never seen him at all!
If a man could always have the world in his front, courage would not be
much of a virtue, if it _ever_ is. There are a great many worthless
things passed about as genuine. Now, that little Spartan scamp who
stole the fox, hid it under his robe, and let the creature relieve him
of his liver rather than be found out and lose the plunder, is handed
about with a label to him, as a sort of pocket-model of fortitude. I
dug it out of Greek when I was a boy, and was taught it was worth
finding. Why, he was nothing but a miserable little thief, that
couldn't speak a word of English! So, if courage is a virtue, the brave
little wren carries more virtue to the ounce than anything going. The
writer knows a public speaker who trembles as did the king who saw
something written on the wall, if he is compelled to pass through the
body of the house to reach the platform, and yet always faces the
audience with perfect self-possession. He has been known to flounder
through an unbroken snow-drift, and climb in by a window, simply to
avoid the flank movement that took all his courage out of him. When you
see a man turn a cold shoulder to a chilling wind instead of squarely
facing it, you may count him among the victims of rheumatism, and not
among the philosophers.
CHAPTER XXIV.
LIGHT AND SHADE.
The saddest train upon which the writer ever took passage was the
Hospital Train, with its maimed and mangled burden, that ran from the
still, white tents of Stevenson, Ala., to Nashville, Tenn., just after
the battle of Chickamauga. There was no lack of ventilation, for some
of the cars were platforms--the kind that make Martyrs, but not
Presidents. Not much finish in precious woods anywhere that you could
see. It rained heavily and persistently through the twelve hour trip,
and there the wounded lay strewn about on the platforms, and packed
away in the box-cars. But you heard less complaint than is made any day
on a palace-train because one refractory rose-leaf is crumpled. The
suffering was silent, and all the more terrible because it was so. The
stricken boys had started for home, and there was a strange, ghastly
cheerfulness upon their faces, that was sadder than sadness. They
talked about "God's country," whither they were bound, till your heart
ached to think how many of them would find "God's acre" before they
reached the blessed North.
The bearing of that wounded brigade was wonderfully glorified with the
grace of patience. It taught you what splendid stuff human nature is
made of. They tell about men of iron, and nerves of steel, and look as
if they thought they had said something--as if there were anything
_quite_ so good to make a man of as the flesh that can quiver and
the nerve that can twinge. Those cars on that Chattanooga Road were bad
enough, though the reader cannot get the idea unless he amuses himself
by riding upon a lively trip-hammer; but of all wheeled contrivances,
the ambulance that was used in the late war is the most spiteful. You
would naturally think it "an invention of the enemy"--that he had
devised it for the special purpose of finishing the people he had not
quite killed with gunpowder. The jolty, jerky thing, with wolf-trap
springs that snap at every inequality in the road, and send waves of
pain through the shattered frames of its occupants, is, for a merciful
device, certainly the most cruel. Be our prayer, that neither hospital
train nor ambulance will be needed evermore in all the land!
Did you ever see troops of young swallows peppering the southern slope
of a broad-roofed barn, just as they are making ready to leave for a
sunnier clime? What confusion of happy tongues, what half-human chatter
and frolic. If you would see the same picture later in the season,
after the swallows are all gone, just board a passenger train in
December upon a road lined with schools for girls, like the Chicago
and Milwaukee, when the flocks are let loose and bound home for the
holidays. The birds are gayer and brighter, and worth a gallon of
swallows every one of them, no matter whether swallows are higher than
sparrows or not--half a farthing apiece--but they recall the picture on
the barn-slope, till the girls and the birds seem to be twittering over
the same dish of joyous expectation.
You had left Milwaukee a little dull and a trifle surly, but as the
train halts along at those beautiful villages where the dove-cotes are,
and the merry creatures throng aboard, and captivate you and take the
train, and fill it with laughter and ribbons, and jaunty little hats
about as big as the palm of your hand, and sit down three in a seat,
when their flounces will let them, and talk all at once and all the
time, then you, too, brighten up and grow human, and wish you were a
boy or a girl again, so that you could see things rose-colored, and
think it blessing enough to live, and be happy without a plan. Whoever
says gravely to himself, "I am going to be happy to-day," is pretty
sure to have a sober-sided time of it. I do not think anybody can
_toe_ happiness, as the children used to toe a crack when they stood up
to spell. A great deal of the commodity comes to a man when he is not
looking for it, just as a side-glance sometimes reveals a star that the
astronomer had been vainly seeking with the direct gaze.
The Lord has arranged things wisely for our mere physical delight. He
has not planted all the violets in the world in one place, neither has
He fenced in the roses between particular lines and parallels of
latitude and longitude, nor fashioned them to grow up close under our
noses. But we go carelessly along, and we get a whiff of the violets
down there in the grass, and the lilacs over yonder in the yard, and
the roses in the fence corner, and they all go to make up the fragrance
and the beauty of the day, though we had not been looking for any of
them. It is the indirect ray from everything, whether it be the sun or
the drop of dew, that unravels and makes visible the beauty of the
world.
There is a great deal said about _spheres_. A planetary stranger would
think that about half the world were engaged in getting a lesson in
Spherical Trigonometry--man's sphere and woman's sphere. Most of the
unhappiness, uneasiness, and tendency to bolt spheres, is due to an
impression many people unconsciously entertain, that the Lord did not
understand His business when He made the Gardener and his wife--that
he could have made a better job of it. Take an open-browed,
clean-hearted girl, blessed with a fair share of beauty of some kind,
and then make her believe that she is about the neatest piece of work
the Lord ever made, and _keep_ her believing so, and you will have a
woman by-and-by, if heaven doesn't want her before, who will never
trouble herself much about spheres and tangents, or any other problems
of Social Geometry, but will just brighten and sweeten the world all
the days of her life.
The day those school-girls came into the car there was a sour-visaged
man in it whom you had been watching. His features were all huddled
together--he had done it himself--his eyes, nose, mouth and chin all
puckered to a focus of chronic anxiety. He looked as if he had been
getting those features all ready to be poured through a funnel into a
vinegar-barrel. You were curious to observe the effect of the merry
inroad upon him. At first not a movement. He seemed as sulphuric as
ever. Some of the girls threw little smiles his way, though not at him,
and some of them _hit_ him, and he began to watch them. They were
too many for him, and he concluded he wouldn't run into the
vinegar-barrel just yet.
It was curious to see that small mass-meeting of features break up and
distribute themselves around his face, each in its place, until his
countenance got about as broad as a sun-dial, and about as bright as
the dial does when the sun shines on it. He had been thinking for a
long time that he needed medicine of some kind. As he would have worded
it himself, "he felt a good eel out of kilter," but it was young folks
he needed all the while, and nothing at all that a druggist could sell
him.
CHAPTER XXV.
PRECIOUS CARGOES.
The richest cargo in the world is a cargo of TIME, and the locomotive
was made to draw it. Yesterday I saw a man who tugged his household
goods and gods from East to West in thirty days. To be sure, the roads
had three dimensions, length, breadth and--_thickness_;--who ever knew
a migrant to flit in pleasant weather?--but he drove early and late,
and tired out the family dog and took him aboard--the dog that had
developed his muscles in digging out woodchucks and shaking pole-cats
to pieces in the Catskills. He has made that journey since in thirty
hours, and his account between the old time and the new stands 1:24--a
pretty formidable balance when the commodity is a thing so precious as
time.
Take that piece of animated nature called the commercial traveler, who
slings his little knapsack under his left shoulder-blade and says, "the
world is mine oyster!" He is as much a product of the locomotive as a
puff of steam. He is a wholesale store in a pair of boots. The great
house in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, is trundled about the world by
sample, and he girds up his loins and keeps it company. The engine has
made him possible. He is about as wonderful as the Arabian Genius that
came out of the little bottle and clouded all the land. Let us say he
travels fifteen thousand miles a year; that he keeps upon the track ten
years without breaking his neck; that he begins his commercial raids
at the age of twenty-two, unships his little knapsack, buys out the
wholesale house he "represented," and retires from the road at
thirty-two, thus making a beginning so noble that it fairly laps over
upon the ending.
Now, could you set back his almanac for him about a generation, a
couple of hundred years would be little enough to accomplish the work,
and he must bequeath the unfinished business to his great-grandson--a
legacy from his dead and gone ancestor. Here he is now, with the work
done, all the silver on his dining-table, and not a thread of it in
his hair! Those witches and wizards of locomotives have drawn a cargo
of more than two centuries about the world for him, upon which _he_
could draw at will, and his draft was honored every time. They have
made his days "long in the land," no matter what he thought of his
father; made a young Methuselah of him, two hundred and fifty years
old if a day, and the grasshopper not a grain heavier.
The modern cars have taken aboard what was little thought of in the
early history of locomotives--_breathing_ material. Ventilation
has by no means attained perfection, but remember the low, narrow
boxes, almost as close as mortality's "long home," that they used to
call coaches, in which people made sardines of themselves, and caught
colds and influenzas and asthmas and catarrhs and other musical
instruments, and you will not feel like being very querulous over the
discomforts of modern locomotion. That ancient fashion--it was the best
the stupid old world knew--of boxing a man up in cars full of nitrogen,
was an abomination to chemistry and comfort. A stove in the center, a
sort of altar for the rendering of unseemly offerings that Sir Walter
Raleigh is said to be answerable for, used to form a torrid zone about
eight feet broad, subdued into a pair of temperates, and eked out at
the ends with a couple of frigids, and there you have the climate of
the old railroads. Then, what with those who broke fast on bolognas and
the blessed vegetable that used to keep the girls of Weathersfield
a-crying, you had all the odors of Cologne _except_ cologne.
Did you ever watch a kitten under a receiver when the air-pump began to
rob her of her breathing material?--the signs of distress, the furry
sides working like a busy bellows, the bewildered looking about for
help? If it was a talented kitten, perhaps she discovered the fatal
orifice in the brazen floor whence her life was escaping, and clapped
her paw upon it, as cats have done before now, and so stopped the
robbery and won respect and saved her life. This time the victim is not
a cat but a king, to-wit, one of the American sovereigns, secured in an
old-time car, with nothing aboard to make breath of. It is curious to
see how he degenerates by a series of melancholy transitions into a
miserable vegetable. You put him into the car brisk and bright as
nature will let him be. The sixth hour he grows irritable; the tenth,
dull. His fancy leaves him in the fifteenth. He begins to think how far
it is to dinner, and how much he will eat, for he is just passing
through the brute region, on his way from humanity down to vegetation,
where his epitaph might be, "gone to grass." The eighteenth hour he is
surly; the twentieth, dumb. The twenty-fourth "does" for him and the
metamorphosis is complete, the necromantic experiment is over. He
cannot remember who wrote Milton's "Paradise Lost." He forgets the name
of the principal character in Hamlet. He runs up a few rounds of the
multiplication table just to see if they are all there. He ceases to
think at all, looks steadily out of the window and sees nothing. He
ceases to count anything in the census. He is not so much as
Nebuchadnezzar. He is grass.
But "all things have become new." What speed in the engine; what
priceless cargoes of time and oxygen upon the train; how fast and long
we live in a little while! Let us be glad. Uneasy people sometimes wish
they had been born in the days of Alexander, or Moses, or Methuselah,
or somebody who looms up gigantically in the mists of history. It is
better to live in the days of the Steam-engine. It has conquered more
worlds than Alexander, traversed vaster wildernesses than the
Israelite, and reclaimed them as it went; and behold, by the power of
the Engine we live to be hundreds of years old, and never give it a
thought!
Studying life on the railroad train and looking into a kaleidoscope are
somewhat alike. You cannot exhaust the figures in the one, and almost
every turn of the wheels brings up a new and curious combination in the
other. And so I find myself wondering why I omitted this, forgot that,
and ever thought I could possibly be content with the few chance
glimpses at thirty miles an hour that are here recorded.
The Engineer has rung the bell, the Conductor has pulled the cord, the
Passenger Train has gone. There is nothing now to be done except to
ship by a dull freight train a little heavy
[Illustration: BAGGAGE]
BAGGAGE
CHAPTER I.
MY STARRY DAYS.
There are some stars to which, in my boyhood, I was wont to lay special
claim. Perhaps everybody is. I never thought of their being out of the
jurisdiction of the State of New York, where I first began to "see
stars," not meaning those early experiments upon the glare ice of
Leonard's Pond, when my heels went up like Mercury's, and my head went
down like the flintlock of an old Queen's arm. One large ripe star used
to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods--I loved to fancy it
would lodge sometime, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I did for
beech-nuts--a star with such a warm and human sort of light, so like an
earthly fire-side somewhere, with the door open, that it always
inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much among the belongings
of that particular landscape as the daisies in the pasture, and not
more than a breath or two farther off.
I have heard since that it has charmed no end of poets to write verses
to it that never were sent; that it is called Venus, when it deserves
an honest womanly name--Mary or Rachel, Ruth or Eve. Is it not strange
that we christen a great beautiful world as we would not dare name
anybody's daughter, unless her mother had an extra pair of feet in
daily use, or her father were content to be called "Towzer"--at least
now that the turbaned "aunty," who opened her mouth like a piano and
laughed clear across the plantation, has been "amended" and counted in
among the souls to be saved.
If the heathen began the nomenclature of the skies, pray let it be
ended by Christians. There are no Alexanders about, to be crying for
new worlds. They are glittering into the field of view every night or
two, and the business of naming goes on after the fashion of dead and
dusty idolaters. Had Adam made such work "calling names" when the Lord
bade him, he would have been sent down on his knees there in Eden to
weed onions unto tears and repentance. Let our star-finders give
them a hint--those keen fellows who shall, by-and-by, roll that date
of theirs, _Anno Domini 3,000_, over and over like a school of
dolphins--that _we_, at least, have abandoned Latin and Greek gods;
that our poultry are quite safe for all anybody in America, be he fool
or philosopher, ordering a cock served up to Æsculapius.
But if ever anything thoroughly belonged to the owner, the heavenly
Dipper--that magnificent utensil knobbed at the angles and riveted
along the handle with seven stars--belonged to me. I should have
clutched it long ago if, like the dagger of Shakespeare's man, it had
only hung "the handle toward my hand;" as much household ware as its
humble cousin forty times removed, that hung by a little chain beside
the well. From that celestial dipper--or so I thought--the dews were
poured out gently on the summer world. It was the only thing about the
house perfectly safe from thieves and rust; for was it not of a truth a
treasure laid up in heaven? And how sadly right I was; for there, only
last night, blazed the Dipper as if it were fire-new, while the home of
my boyhood has faded out like a dream and vanished away.
There was yet another trinket of domesticated heaven, if I may say so.
No matter what name the Chaldeans called it by, to me it will always be
the star in the well. A gray sweep swayed up above that well like an
acute accent; and in its round liquid disc, that gave me glance for
glance, I used to see sometimes the double of a star straight from the
top of heaven. It was plainer than any pearl that "ever lay under
Oman's green water." They that drank at that well in the old days, long
ago sat down by the river of crystal in the Kingdom of Life, but its
dark disc, like a strange unwinking eye, still watches the zenith from
its depths, and sometimes a star is let down into it till it kindles as
if lighted by a thought.
That handful of household stars is a part of my heritage. No matter how
dim the night, how disastered the sky, I close my eyes and they yet
rise strangely beautiful and shine across the cloudy world even as they
always shone since their illustrious kindred began to sing together.
The prayer of the athletic savage was "for light." But our terrestrial
day is only a veil thick-woven of sunbeam warp and woof. The dewy hand
of Night withdraws it, and lo! the heavens are all abroad! Let Ajax
mend his prayer, and let the burden be for calm unclouded night.
But there is another constellation not less precious than my sidereal
possessions--a cluster of day-stars as resplendent as if they were
called Arcturus every one. They shine with a warm and genial
ray--undimmed, thank God! by any care or cloud. Time is not, as most
men think, a natural product. It is only fragments of duration
fashioned into shape. The whirling worlds of God are so much burnished
machinery for making times and seasons. They ripple the everlasting
current of white and dumb duration. It swells in ages, undulates in
years; and all along the ceaseless solemn flow, sparkle like syllables
of song the days of all our lives. The tumbling planets end their work,
and man's begins. Whoever stamps the image and superscription of a
worthy deed, a sterling truth, a splendid fact, upon a day, has
hallowed and brightened it evermore. The day a man is born who rallies
the sluggish race and puts it on its honor for all time, stands out
from the rank and file of the dull almanac and halts you like a
sentinel. The day a man is dead who gave some _other_ day a might
and meaning it never had before, is strewn with immortelles and borne
abreast with marching ages.
Take a twenty-fifth of January, one hundred and eleven years
ago--standing there in its place as plain as yesterday, illuminated all
over, like an old saint's legend, with Scottish song that comes to a
man like the beat of his heart,--and tell me if you think it worth
while for anybody to be born on that recurring day with any hope of
wresting it from "Robert Burns, Poet"? True, the Ettrick Shepherd saw
the light on a twenty-fifth, but the best we can do for him is to let
his "Skylark" warble up to the top of the wintry morning if it can.
The Man of Mount Vernon endowed February, that cheapest of the months,
with a twenty-second it never owned before; took what had been a blank
white leaf between a brace of nights, so bent back upon it the radiant
truth of all his life, that, independent of the sun, it shines right
on--the radiant truth that the man of truest symmetry is the man of
truest power.
And what more can any one do for that seventh of February than he did
to be born in it, whom Dombey shall lead gently by the hand far down
another age, for whom Little Nell shall plead with a forgetful world,
and who left us the voice of Tiny Tim for a perpetual benediction--"God
bless us, Every one!"
THE OLD-TIME FOURTH.
I would not give much for the American who has nowhere in the year a
day domed like a tower and filled with a chime of bells. Now, the
FOURTH OF JULY is one of my days with stars in it, and bells withal,
that shine and ring and roar out of my childhood with an eloquence that
always sets the heart pounding with the concussion of the anvil and the
feet keeping step to the frolic of Yankee Doodle. It lights up the time
when you could stand upright under life's Eastern eaves; when day broke
in the thunder of a six-pounder, and the sun came up to the clangor of
the village bell, and the bare and barkless spar they had raised and
planted the night before, budded like Aaron's rod, and blossomed out
with the broad field of stars.
On comes the drum-major, now with "eyes to the front all," and now
facing the music with backward step, his arms swaying up and down, the
horizontal baton grasped firmly in his hands, as if he were working
the band with a _brake_, and playing streams of martial melody on
mankind. Then the snarl of the snare-drums, all careened for punishment
like refractory boys of the old-fashioned stripe, and the growl of the
big bass brother at their heels, and the fifes warbling up and down in
the grumble and roar, possessed and summoned up my soul--shall I say it
and give thanks?--possess and summon up my soul to-day. Then came the
flag with an eagle on it, and two spontoons beside it to pierce that
eagle's enemies. Then the patriots of the Revolution, who remembered
when there was no such thing as a Fourth of July with a big F; old
smoky fellows, two or three, with eagles in their eyes--old fellows
gnarled like the hemlock, but honored like the pine, that had smelled
powder at Bennington; and the orator of the day with an eagle in his
eye; and the clergyman who had prayed a short prayer and fired a long
gun at Yorktown or somewhere, with an eagle in _his_ eye.
Then, to the tune of "Bonaparte crossing the Rhine," out stepped the
white-legged infantry, with breasts and backs of blue, each with an
eagle sewed upon a bright tin plate, all garnished round with stars and
fastened to his hat, and that eagle's royal tail feathering out at the
top the while, to plume him up like Henry of Navarre.
Then came the riflemen in green frock-coats and caps befringed, and
horns slung at their sides, that once were tossed defiant upon a shaggy
head that might have answered back the bulls of Bashan, and had, for
anything you know, an eagle in _its_ eye; and on they went, their
rifles lightly borne to the order of "_Trail_--ARMS!" Ah, it was
"the hunters of Kentucky" all over again. It was the whole Boone
family in the flesh. It was an apparition of the dark and bloody
ground.
Then, with the warble of bugle and much clatter, clang and ring of
hoofs and spurs and scabbards, the old-fashioned troopers rode by with
eagles in _their_ eyes; their holsters, small packages of thunder
and lightning, at the saddle-bow; their shiny cylinders of portmanteaus
snugly strapped behind; the terrible frown of a bear-skin cap lowering
on every brow, its jaunty feather, tipped with emblematic blood,
springing out of the fur like the blossom of a magnified and glorified
bull-thistle--and the flare of the red-coats set the scene and your
heart on fire together!
Then came the citizens by twos, as the pairs went into the ark, and the
girls in white frocks with sashes and ribbons of blue, as if they had
just torn out of heaven and brought away with them some fragments of
azure for token; but there are no eagles any more in the line--only
white doves and angels unfallen. Then the mouth of the orator was
opened--a coop of rhetorical eagles, and they flew abroad and swooped
down upon our feelings and bore them aloft triumphant, and perched upon
our souls and made eyries in our lofty hearts, and we were better and
braver for it all. Then came the dinner in a "bower"--have you quite
forgotten the dining-hall of green branches?--with such dainty roasters
as the Gentle Elia would have wept over and then devoured, and toasts
that foamed over the tops of the goblets and set themselves aright in
the cups; and a flight of hurrahs went up with the eagles--and the day
was done.
Do you think I would exchange that dear absurd old day for "the pomp
and circumstance" of any later pageant? A Fourth-of-Julyism has somehow
become an object of contempt. People tell us, but not always in good
English, that speeches are idle, because they have heard that silence
is golden, and, like the green spectacles of Moses and the talk of the
rascal in the Vicar of Wakefield, should be labeled "_fudge_." As if
it was not an _idea_ clothed in a snug jacket of words, and not
a deed at all, that first gave the Fourth of July a meaning and a gift
to mankind! As if the elder Adams' recipe to pickle the day--I write
with no irreverence--to pickle the day in "villainous saltpetre" would
not be sure to keep it! As if the roar of artillery--thank God for the
blank cartridges of Independence!--were anything more than that
eloquent whisper uttered under the shadow of King's Mountain in the old
North State, "these colonies are, and of right ought to be, free,"
translated into the dialect of gunpowder! Shine on, starry day of my
boyhood! Thy thunders, thy eagles, and thy memories, be they blessed
forever!
THANKSGIVING.
I am sorry for the man--especially the woman--who has nowhere a day or
two touched with some tender grace; a day of which, travel fast and far
as he may, he is never out of sight; that warms his heart for him,
makes him gentler, purer, younger than before, more like a woman and
just as much of a man. Everywhere else in Christendom the year has
three hundred and sixty-five days, but in America it has a day of
grace, and as much a New England product as Joel Barlow or Indian corn:
for we count three hundred and sixty-five days and THANKSGIVING.
As everybody knows, the day was the most blessed of blunders. Those
single-minded, grand old fellows--old when they were young--that
drifted across the sea in the cup of a Flower like a parcel of bees,
bringing, some of them, their stings with them, and from whose rude
beginnings this broad continent now hums like a hive in June, had
garnered their corn, and tugged up their back-logs, and kicked the
light snow of "squaw winter" from their Spanish-leather boots, and hung
up their tall hats on the pegs behind the door, and picked their flints
for such game as red Indian and black bear, and spread open their
Bibles, and made ready for a sojourn before the fire; then came one of
the American savages they never shot at--to-wit: Indian Summer.
For past the yellow regiments of corn
There came an Indian maiden, autumn-born;
And June returned and held her by the hand,
And led Time's smiling Ruth through all the land.
So they made ready for a second planting right away, and declared it a
goodly land, where a very thin slice of autumn was sandwiched between
two summers, and decreed a Thanksgiving, and called the neighbors
together, and lifted up their voices and sang some such quaint song
as--
"Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,
Your Maker's praises spout;
Up from your sands, ye codlings, peep,
And wag your tails about!"
and clasped each other's hands, and feasted abundantly, and took "a
cup of kindness," and grew so warm with what they had and what they
_would_ have, that when Euroclydon and all the rest of them did come,
and that right early, their gratitude never froze, but wintered it
through; and so Thanksgiving remains even until now.
Dear Starry Day, when three generations met together and--not to betray
confidences--"righteousness and peace kissed each other." What
friendships were brightened in thy fire-light! what wrongs were roasted
under thy fore-stick! Thy turnovers are imperishable as the Pleiades.
Thy chickens of the nankeen legs tucked up in a coverlet of crust, and,
brooded in the bake-kettle by its great coal-laden cover, how
comfortable they were! Out of the glowing cavern of the brick oven,
squatted in the wall beside the fireplace like an exaggerated cat, what
gusts of fragrance from thy turkeys, breasted like dead knights in
armor, "whose souls are with the saints, we trust;" what whiffs of
Indian pudding! what blended breezes of abundance! Thy doughnuts of
orthodox twist, and tinted like cedar wood, yet heap the bright tin
pans of memory. Thy mighty V's of mince pies yet slant to the angle of
perfect content, and fit and fill the mouth of recollection.
Surely heart and stomach are next-door neighbors, for now,
Thanksgiving, thy dear old faces smile a welcome home; thy dear old
faces, every one unchanged, undimmed, unsent away. Rouse the fire to a
hearty roar of greeting! Wheel out the great table laden like the palm
of Providence. Bring forth the empty chairs. Let us "ask a blessing!"
Let us give thanks!
CHRISTMAS.
Methuselah died pretty well along in his years of discretion, but a
world at his age would hardly have been out of its swaddling bands.
There is a star, less than two thousand years old, that lights a day
for us, the fairest, youngest of all the spangled multitude--the very
Benjamin of Heaven. The telescope of the astronomer never summoned it.
Numbered in the celestial census, I am sure it will not be there when
the constellations are rolled together as a scroll. It is immortal as
the candle of the Lord. It is the Star in the East that lights up
CHRISTMAS for us with a wonderful radiance.
If there is ever a time in all the year when the two worlds touch, I
think it is Christmas Eve. What less than a first small act of faith is
that hanging a million of empty stockings by a million pins at night,
and then tumbling the trundle-beds of Christendom with the delightful
and sleepless expectancy that they will find them all filled in the
morning? Let a man play Saturn and _eat_ his children and be done
with it; but let him not set a dog on their angels--a cur of a fact,
that should have been born with its nose in a muzzle, upon Santa Claus
or Kriss Kringle, and worry him out of the children's sweet kingdom of
dreams.
Whoever wants to make his children older than any wholesome grandfather
ought to be, has only to strip the world stark naked before their
faces; bare all its exquisite mystery that keeps one pair of burnished
interrogation-points for ever dancing in another pair of eyes, resolve
the thrones and paradises and angels they see in the plighted clouds,
into a heavy and delusive fog; and, by-and-by, for the quicksilverish
atoms of humanity that hunt out every grain of true gold in the rubbish
of life, full of marvel and fancy and poetry as any old ballad, he will
have a row of little desiccated, unspeculative, philosophical donkeys
all draped in wet blankets.
I visited, not long ago, the house where something happened to me when
I narrowly escaped being too young to be counted, but you can never
guess what was the first thing I looked for. It was not, as you might
think, the threshold worn smooth and beautiful by the touch of feet
that have played truant forever, nor the dear home-room with its
altar-place for beech and maple offerings, nor yet the nook of darkness
under the stairs where goblins and ogres held sweet counsel together by
night.
It was only the old chimney-top my eyes first sought, to whose rugged
edges and sooty mouthpiece a thousand boatswain winds had put their
lips and whistled up the storms for eighty years. It was the homeliest
structure that ever seemed beautiful to anybody. Shall I tell you why?
Down that chimney the angel descended with my first Christmas gift.
What was the ladder of Jacob to me then, has turned, at last, into a
rude unlettered monument to the dead past.
They whom I surprised with my "Merry Christmas," in the gray of the
morning, have gone away for the everlasting holidays. The children with
whom I joined hands and hearts are--_where_ are they? There are
fences in the graveyard tipped with funeral urns of black. There are
broken slabs of marble bearing names that have fallen out of human
speech. There are hard, grim men. There are meek and sad-eyed women,
full of care. _Has_ the sparkle of life utterly vanished from the
cup? Can the sleigh-bells' chime and the glittering nights and the
laugh of young girls and the measure of old songs charm no more?
Oh, Comrades! oh, Sweethearts! Let me give you a touch of the time when
happiness was the very cheapest thing in the round world: let me give
you "a merry Christmas" out of the loneliness!
But children are not out of fashion, and so the world is not bankrupt.
Herod--he deserves the compliment and he shall have it--Herod was
nothing less than devilish shrewd when he fancied he could quench
Christmas in the blood of the children; for if ever two things were
made for each other, a merry child and a merry Christmas are the two.
What the poor creatures did that were born and grown before the clock
of the Christian era struck "one" nobody can tell. We all _need_
such days--the young that they may never grow old; the old that they
may always be young. I think it might be written among the beatitudes:
"Blessed are they whose sons are all boys and whose daughters are
all girls."
It was when Cæsar Augustus decreed that "all the world" should be
enrolled--an edict never to be repeated on the planet until the coming
of the Seventh Angel--and everybody was on the move to report in his
native city--for in that country the leap from a howling wilderness
to a city was as easy as a panther's--if it didn't _howl_ it had a
_mayor_!
Among those who came to Bethlehem on this errand were a man and his
wife from Nazareth, and, as the tavern was crowded, they went to the
barn, and there the Chief of Children was born, and cradled in a
manger.
And that was the first Christmas.
There were Angels without, who brought their glory with them, and they
stood and sang, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to the
men of good will!"
And that was the first Christmas Carol.
A few Shepherds watching their flocks not far away came just as they
were, in their every-day clothes, and wondered and glorified, and were
glad.
And that was the first Christmas Party.
Some travelers from the East--and wise, as you may know, by the
cardinal point--were seeking the Christmas, but no one could tell them
anything, till a STAR journeyed on before, and halted, like Gibeon's
sun, over where the young child was--ah, always now as then, find
Christmas and a child is not far off--and they unfolded their
treasures, and gave him gold and frankincense and myrrh.
And that was the first Christmas Gift.
The shepherds are dead, the "wise men" are East, and the angels in
Heaven. But the star and the child and the manger are everywhere. Come,
let us have a frolic together! Even the turkey has a merry-thought in
its breast; and are we not better than a _flock_ of turkeys? Let
us advertise for a good digestion and a downy pillow, and a pleasant
dream and a Merry Christmas. Let us do it in these words:
WANTED--A debtor to be forgiven.
WANTED--A wrong to be forgotten.
WANTED--A heart to be lightened.
WANTED--A home to be brightened.
Wherever the Star halts, there shall be no lack of carols. Bid the
singers begin! And the same old manger chorus swells sweetly again--"On
earth peace to the men of good will!" Shine on, gentle Star! Merry
Christmas, Good Night!
CHAPTER II.
"No. 104,163."
"The great Mercantile Library Enterprise of San Francisco," so I read
in my evening paper, "will positively distribute its prizes on the 31st
of October. Tickets, five dollars in gold."
And then I turned to the glittering roll of fortunes. There they were,
heaped up in an auriferous pyramid curiously balanced on its apex. At
the bottom lay a poor little "$100 in gold," not worth minding, and up
swelled the shining structure,--$1,000--$5,000--$10,000--$25,000--
$50,000--until away at the top blazed clear across the column,
"$100,000 IN GOLD!"
All gold from the land of Gold, the unearthed Ophir of the Solomonic
time. Everything had a bilious tint. It was as if I was seeing creation
through an Oriental topaz. I felt for my ears, lest I had somehow
swapped with Midas for his transmuting touch. No railway conductor was
ever more clamorous for tickets than my heart was. Gold was 113 that
day, so I counted out $5.65, turned it into a Post-office order, and
transmitted it to the nearest agent. The ticket came, a strip of paper
tawny as the Tiber, a faint reflection of "great heaps of gold," as
Clarence said, but not to drown for, as Clarence _did_. It was
covered with "a strange device"--the ticket was--like the handkerchief
the Alpine traveler carried in his hand, who talked Latin and cried
"_Excelsior!_"
To think what splendid possibilities might lurk in that oblong piece of
paper was enough to take one's breath away! I said not a word to
Lucy--that's my wife--but folded it tenderly, as if it were a napkin
with ten talents in it, and laid it away with a gold half dollar and a
broken ring and a curl of hair and a stray pearl that had tumbled out
of an old brooch, and a bit of ribbon and a faint suspicion of dead and
gone fragrance--"all and singular" the contents of a little box that,
forty years ago, would have been a "till" in the upper right-hand
corner of a chest of drawers, and as nearly like an old-fashioned heart
as two things can be that are made to hold the same sort of little
trinkets of love and memory that everybody else foregoes and forgets.
The ticket lay there a month and I never said a word, but I began to
get my money back right away. I tripped up the rounds of the golden
ladder every day, and, strange to tell, I was totally unable to
_stop_ going up until I reached the top and stood with both feet
perched upon "$100,000 in gold." I tried to steady myself a little and
be persuaded that $25,000 would be comfortable. I did my best to
cultivate a sentiment of respect for $50,000, but the paltry sum sank
below the horizon, and like the Spaniard overwhelmed at sight of the
sea, who went down upon his knees on Gilboa or somewhere, I saw nothing
but the golden ocean of $100,000. And why not? Was not the one quite as
easy to get as the other? To be sure, in the glow of my story the
capital prize that stood upon its head as a pyramid, has been fashioned
into a ladder like Jacob's, with the angels of Imagination and Fancy
going up and down thereon, and at last all melted into a sea, has
inundated the whole landscape; but I tell you a man with a hundred
thousand dollars may defy rhetoric and mixed metaphors with impunity.
I thought I would make my will, and "give and bequeath to my
well-beloved wife Lucy" fifty thousand dollars. When I had counted this
out by itself, the heap of gold glittered so that it dazzled me out of
my discretion, and I asked Lucy, in a quiet way, whether if I had
$100,000 in gold and should will her fifty thousand free and clear, it
would be enough. She laughed and said she thought it would be liberal!
I then told her what I had done. Now, Lucy is pretty square-cornered
mentally, but she comes of a stock on the mother's side somewhat given
to dreaming. That mother of hers--she is seventy-six if she is a
day--will see as much beauty in the sky and breathe the fragrance of
the apple-blossoms with as fresh a pleasure as if the world were only
sixteen years old, and world and woman were born twins. She will sit
down any time upon a damp bank of crimson and gold cloud that flanks
the sunset, and never think of taking cold more than she did forty
years ago. She is always seeing faces in the fire, and laying plans
that will never be hatched, and altogether has a thousand luxuries that
the tax-gatherer can not possibly get into his schedule. Lucy betrays
her lineage. When I give her a "ten" sometimes, she will fold her arms,
swing slowly to and fro in the rocking-chair, and pay it all out over
and over, and get her money's worth in ever so many things useful and
beautiful, and the green-backed decimal will be snugly lying all the
while in that same box of momentous trifles. I think ten dollars go as
far with Lucy as twenty-five do with most people, and by the same sign
make her two and a half times as happy.
"Port"--that is the name of my boy--saw not a glimmer of gold for days
and days after Lucy had her saffronian vision. He toiled on like
Bunyan's fellow with the muck-rake at his calling, nor saw the angel,
golden even as a sunflower, that floated overhead. It seemed a pity to
wrong him out of his inheritance, and so I told him. I said, "Port, we
are a rich family," and showed him the strip of paper. He ticked off
the figures slowly, like a clock just running down, 1-0-4-1-6-3, and
said--nothing. I thought he lacked gratitude, and so I made a plunge
into the dark ages for something to punish him with, and came up with
the brand-new fact that ingratitude is a crime so base the ancients
never thought it worth while to make a law against it, as nobody,
probably, would ever be guilty of it. "Port" went out, and I at once
set about erasing the last cypher of the bequest I had made the boy, so
that what had read $10,000 became $1,000, and I devised all the rest
for the cultivation of gratitude in the human family.
Meanwhile the days grew shorter and shorter, like the strings of
David's harp, and October was about done, and the drawing was at hand.
But what mattered it all? We had entered into possession already. We
had invested one hundred thousand of the prize in the best of
securities, and we were receiving eight thousand dollars a year, for
you see it was $100,000 in gold, to-wit: $113,000 in greenbacks. We
owed no man anything. We had traveled all over the broad domain of
Columbus' magnificent "find." We had given two thousand dollars a year
to objects of benevolence. We had bought exquisite works of art, and
sent a dozen poor painters of good pictures abroad. We had imported
rare old English books and strewn them upon our tables and given them
to our neighbors. We presented an illustrated copy of "Paradise Lost"
to our wood-sawyer one day, a copy reinforced like his breeches, with
leather, and he was very grateful, and sat down upon it when he ate his
bread and cheese and said it was "good," and we were gratified. We
purchased a sober horse and a modest carriage, and propped up the line
fence and shingled the kitchen. In a word, the gaunt wolf I had been
trying for years to keep away from the door, had been brained at last
with a golden club, and his skin lay upon the carriage floor for a
foot-robe.
There was a legion of people we wanted to help--a great many of them
when we first began, and I told Lucy to get a quire of paper and make
a catalogue, but somehow or other they got fewer as we thought about
it, until she numbered every one upon her fingers that seemed to have
much hold upon our affections. Those I pensioned off in the most
liberal manner, and had quite a warm and genial feeling about my
heart, as if I had really been beneficent and _done_ something, when I
had only been benevolent and _wished_ something. We had two or three
wealthy neighbors who had gathered richness as damp logs gather moss,
and that was about all there was of it--aggregating golden egg after
golden egg, flattening themselves out like an incubating goose
ambitious to cover the whole nest, and calling the proceeding
"enterprise." I would set these mossy fellows an example that should
rebuke them to the tips of their ears. And so I gave twenty thousand
dollars for a public library to be free to all residents of the town
forever. We had made Christmas "merry" and New Year "happy" for many a
heart that would else have had neither one nor the other.
I am glad now to be able to state that there was only one man whom I
had the least desire to humble when I became an hundred thousand
strong, and he was an insurance agent--a retired doctor, who, growing
weary of saving lives with pills, had taken to insuring lives with
policies. He was always tormenting me "to insure." He looked me over
like an undertaker with a measure in his eye. He kept me constantly
reminded of the fact of death, as if it were inevitable. I hardly ever
saw him that I did not fancy him rushing around to my widow the next
day after I had won the wager, paying her the amount of insurance, and
thence away to the printing office with a card flickering in his hand,
inscribed with words and figures following, to-wit:
AGENT OF THE SO-AND-SO INSURANCE CO.:
I thank you for the prompt payment of the sum of $10,000, for which
amount you had insured my late husband's life.
Gratefully,
LUCY.
Late husband indeed! The pulses of a pound of cold putty are lively
compared with my circulation at the idea of that sort of "late"--too
late ever to be again "on time." Well, all I want of that doctor is
that he shall solicit me once more, when I will say, "Insure? Do I look
like a man who needs help for his perishing family? Examine my
will--Lucy, $50,000! 'Port,' $20,000! Accept an invitation to my Free
Library. Be silent and be happy. Good morning," and with this nightcap
for his importunity, I would pass graciously on like a great
harvest-moon when it gives the last touch to the ripening regiments of
corn.
And the thirty-first of October came at last, and the supreme hour for
the turn of the wheel away there in the city of the Golden Gate, but
what should I care? The capital prize had all been won, and invested,
and given away and expended. I had _rehearsed_ the fortune and it
had left no corroding care--that word "corroding," heart-gnawing it
_ought_ to mean; think of a lively rodent, say a squirrel, in a
beating heart!--had kindled no passion, scattered no Greek fire of
pride or envy anywhere. What _more_ need I desire, and yet I could
hardly help wondering if they knew I had purchased the ticket 104,163;
whether when--not if, for there is never an "if" in the land of dreams
and of Spain--when the capital prize should be declared off to me out
of the great wheel, they would not telegraph me at once from San
Francisco, for I certainly would pay the expense without a murmur. I
went to the door once or twice to see if the telegraph messenger might
not be coming, and I at once gave him one hundred dollars in gold. But
night distanced the telegram and reached me first. Possibly, though,
the agent in Chicago may write me by the evening mail, and I gave one
hundred dollars in gold to the man that licked the envelope, and one
hundred dollars in gold to the man who delivered the letter. But the
mail came and the letter did not. I was sorry for the loss the clerk in
the post-office had suffered, and made up my mind to make him librarian
of my Free Library at a salary of a thousand dollars a year.
Along in the evening Lucy and I had a little discussion as to whether
we should not take the prize in gold, say double eagles, and put them
all to roost on the dining table, and call in a few friends to see the
golden aviary with its blessed birds of Paradise, and borrow the
neighbor's steelyards, as somebody did in the touching story of the
"Forty Thieves," or some other Arabian Night's entertainment, and
weigh the hundred thousand avoirdupois, and then send it back to
Chicago and have the dead metal return all in full leaf, green as
Vallombrosa, say an hundred 1,000-dollar bills, or a thousand
100-dollar bills, Lucy and I could hardly tell which.
The first of November dawned as brightly as November ever dawns, and
with it came the tidings that my "$100,000 in gold" had somehow, by
mistake no doubt, been drawn by somebody else, and that ticket 104,163
was worth--well--about a twist for a cigar-lighter! My imagination
slipped down the golden ladder that, like the Patriarch's, had an angel
at the top and a pillow of stone at the bottom--slipped down from its
high estate and made a Rachel of itself, "and would not be comforted."
I left the parlor, where I had been sitting for the last month because
I thought I could afford to, and went away disconsolate into the
kitchen, but "Willie," the mocking bird, was singing a pleasant song. I
returned to the parlor and Lucy, the heiress to the half of my fortune,
was laughing a pleasant laugh, and "Port," whom I had forgiven in a
codicil, and left $20,000, said he did not care a "Continental" for the
whole business, which, considering that Continental currency, toward
the last of it, was sold low, at about so much a peck, "dry measure,"
may be taken as a pretty forcible expression of his perfect
cheerfulness under the disaster.
But _was_ it a disaster? Had I not had the prize, and enjoyed it
and shared it and bequeathed it? My fortune had never tempted a thief.
It had neither put the prayer of the Lord nor of Agur out of fashion:
"Give us this day our daily bread!" "Give me neither poverty nor
riches!" So far as I have heard, "104,163" was the lucky number after
all, and I certainly believe nobody ever before received so much for so
little--$100,000 in imperishable gold for five dollars and sixty-five
cents, true coin of the realm of an imagination and a fancy both warmed
into a life curiously fresh and new by the touch of a hope, never to be
realized, of mere material wealth.
"One blast upon a bugle horn,"--if we may trust a man who was more
conscientious in the telling of fiction than most men are in relating
the truth,--was "worth a thousand men." Jericho came down at the blast
of a horn.
Fame's shall give breath, and all the land shall give heed. Gabriel's
shall sound, and the dead shall be intent. But cornucopia the golden
is the _exalted_ horn among the nations. They always see the
glittering millions lavished from the broader end that flares and
blossoms like a tulip, but it is strange they do not oftener discern
the diminished man coming out at the other and the lesser end of the
self-same horn. The wealth may make a ladder and rig it out with rounds
commanding loftier planes and broader views, but there must be a foot
bold enough to climb them, and a brain balanced enough to regard the
grander horizons and the growing lights undizzied and undazzled, and a
heart true enough to be touched and softened and kindled by it all into
the living belief that these words are worthy of all acceptation:
"Faith, Hope, Charity--these three, but the GREATEST of these
is Charity." A belief lodged in the head is _there_, but a belief
lodged in the heart is _every_where.
As for Lucy and I, our "castles in Spain" are all builded and peopled,
the lawns around them are Elysian, the sky above them is clear heaven,
sunshine plays forever around their purple towers. Let us make fast the
door against the wolf we thought we had killed with a bludgeon of gold,
and betake ourselves again with cheerfulness and content to our
possessions in Spain--ours forever and a day by the power of the charm
that lay hid in the ticket I purchased--and Lucy, "Port" and I do
earnestly wish that all the readers of this chapter from life, if they
do not draw the Capital Prize, may at least gain that next best
thing--the treasure wrapped up, like a rose in a bud, in Number
104,163.
CHAPTER III.
OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER.
"I find the marks of my shortest steps beside those of my beloved
mother, which were measured by my own," says Dumas, and so conjures up
one of the sweetest images in the world. He was revisiting the home of
his infancy; he was retracing the little paths around it in which he
had once walked; and strange flowers could not efface, and rank grass
could not conceal, and cruel ploughs could not obliterate, his
"shortest footsteps," and his mother's beside them, measured by his
own.
And who needs to be told whose footsteps they were that thus kept time
with the feeble pattering of childhood's little feet? It was no mother
beside whom Ascanius walked "with equal steps" in Virgil's line, but a
strong, stern man, who could have borne him and not been burdened;
folded him in his arms from all danger and not been wearied;
everything, indeed, he could have done for him, but just what he needed
most--could not sympathize with him--he could not be a child again. Ah,
a rare art is that,--for, indeed, it is an art, to set back the great
old clock of time and be a boy once more! Man's imagination can easily
see the child a man; but how hard it is for it to see the man a child;
and he who had learned to glide back into that rosy time when he did
not know that thorns were under the roses, or that clouds would ever
return after the rain; when he thought a tear could stain a cheek no
more than a drop of rain a flower; when he fancied that life had no
disguise, and hope no blight at all--has come as near as anybody can to
discovering the North-west passage to Paradise.
And it is, perhaps, for this reason that it is so much easier for a
mother to enter the kingdom of Heaven than it is for the rest of the
world. She fancies she is leading the children, when, after all, the
children are leading her, and they keep her, indeed, where the river is
narrowest, and the air is clearest; and the beckoning of the radiant
band is so plainly seen from the other side, that it is no wonder she
so often lets go her clasp upon the little finger she is holding, and
goes over to the neighbor's, and the children follow like lambs to the
fold; for we think it ought somewhere to be written: "Where the mother
is, there will the children be also."
But it was not of the mother, but of the dear old-fashioned
grandmother, whose thread of love spun "by hand" on life's little
wheel, and longer and stronger than they make it now, was wound around
and about the children she saw playing in the children's arms, in a
true love-knot that nothing but the shears of Atropos could sever; for
do we not recognize the lambs sometimes, when summer days are over and
autumn winds are blowing, as they come bleating from the yellow fields,
by the crimson thread we wound about their necks in April or May, and
so undo the gate and let the wanderers in?
Blessed be the children who have an old-fashioned grandmother. As they
hope for length of days let them love and honor her, for we can tell
them they will never find another.
There is a large old kitchen somewhere in the past, and an
old-fashioned fireplace therein, with its smooth old jambs of
stone--smooth with many knives that have been sharpened there--smooth
with many little fingers that have clung there. There are andirons,
too--the old andirons, with rings in the top, whereon many temples of
flame have been builded, with spires and turrets of crimson. There is a
broad, worn hearth, worn by feet that have been torn and bleeding by
the way, or been made "beautiful," and walked upon floors of tesselated
gold. There are tongs in the corner, wherewith we grasped a coal, and
"blowing for a little life," lighted our first candle; there is a
shovel, wherewith were drawn forth the glowing embers in which we saw
our first fancies and dreamed our first dreams--the shovel with which
we stirred the sleepy logs till the sparks rushed up the chimney as if
a forge were in blast below, and wished we had so many lambs, so many
marbles, or so many somethings that we coveted; and so it was we wished
our first wishes.
There is a chair--a low, rush-bottom chair; there is a little wheel in
the corner, a big wheel in the garret, a loom in the chamber. There are
chests full of linen and yarn, and quilts of rare pattern, and samples
in frames.
And everywhere and always the dear old wrinkled face of her whose firm,
elastic step mocks the feeble saunter of her children's children--the
old-fashioned grandmother of twenty years ago. She, the very Providence
of the old homestead--she who loved us all, and said she wished there
were more of us to love, and took all the school in the Hollow for
grand-children besides. A very expansive heart was hers, beneath that
woolen gown, or that more stately bombazine, or that sole heir-loom of
silken texture.
We can see her to-day, those mild blue eyes, with more of beauty in
them than time could touch or death do more than hide--those eyes that
held both smiles and tears within the faintest call of every one of us,
and soft reproof, that seemed not passion but regret. A white tress has
escaped from beneath her snowy cap; she has just restored a wandering
lamb to its mother; she lengthened the tether of a vine that was
straying over a window, as she came in, and plucked a four-leaved
clover for Ellen. She sits down by the little wheel--a tress is running
through her fingers from the distaff's disheveled head, when a small
voice cries "Grandma!" from the old red cradle, and "Grandma!" Tommy
shouts from the top of the stairs. Gently she lets go the thread, for
her patience is almost as beautiful as her charity, and she touches the
little bark in a moment, till the young voyager is in a dream again,
and then directs Tommy's unavailing attempts to harness the cat. The
tick of the clock runs faint and low, and she opens the mysterious door
and proceeds to wind it up. We are all on tip-toe, and we beg in a
breath to be lifted up one by one, and look in the hundredth time upon
the tin cases of the weights, and the poor lonely pendulum, which goes
to and fro by its little dim window, and never comes out in the world,
and our petitions are all granted, and we are lifted up, and we all
touch with a finger the wonderful weights, and the music of the little
wheel is resumed.
Was Mary to be married, or Jane to be wrapped in a shroud? So meekly
did she fold the white hands of the one upon her still bosom, that
there seemed to be a prayer in them there; and so sweetly did she
wreathe the white rose in the hair of the other, that one would not
have wondered had more roses budded for company.
How she stood between us and apprehended harm; how the rudest of us
softened beneath the gentle pressure of her faded and tremulous hand!
From her capacious pocket that hand was ever withdrawn closed, only to
be opened in our own, with the nuts she had gathered, the cherries she
had plucked, the little egg she had found, the "turn-over" she had
baked, the trinket she had purchased for us as the product of her
spinning, the blessing she had stored for us--the offspring of her
heart.
What treasures of story fell from those old lips; of good fairies and
evil, of the old times when she was a girl; and we wondered if
ever--but then she couldn't be handsomer or dearer--but that she ever
was "little." And then, when we begged her to sing! "Sing us one of the
old songs you used to sing mother, grandma."
"Children, I can't sing," she always said; and mother used to lay her
knitting softly down, and the kitten stopped playing with the yarn upon
the floor, and the clock ticked lower in the corner, and the fire died
down to a glow, like an old heart that is neither chilled nor dead, and
grandmother sang. To be sure it wouldn't do for the parlor and the
concert-room now-a-days; but then it was the old kitchen and the
old-fashioned grandmother, and the old ballad, in the dear old times,
and we can hardly see to write for the memory of them, though it is a
hand's breadth to the sunset.
Well, she sang. Her voice was feeble and wavering, like a fountain just
ready to fail, but then how sweet-toned it was; and it became deeper
and stronger, but it couldn't grow sweeter. What "joy of grief" it was
to sit there around the fire, all of us, except Jane, that clasped a
prayer to her bosom, and her we thought we saw, when the hall-door was
opened a moment by the wind; but then we were not afraid, for wasn't it
her old smile she wore?--to sit there around the fire, and weep over
the woes of the "Babes in the Wood," who lay down side by side in the
great solemn shadows; and how strangely glad we felt when the
robin-red-breast covered them with leaves, and last of all when the
angels took them out of the night into Day Everlasting.
We may think what we will of it now, but the song and the story heard
around the kitchen fire have colored the thoughts and lives of most of
us; have given us the germs of whatever poetry blesses our hearts;
whatever memory blooms in our yesterdays. Attribute whatever we may to
the school and the school-master, the rays which make that little day
we call life, radiate from the God-swept circle of the hearthstone.
Then she sings an old lullaby she sang to mother--_her_ mother sang to
her; but she does not sing it through, and falters ere 'tis done. She
rests her head upon her hands, and it is silent in the old kitchen.
Something glitters down between her fingers and the firelight, and it
looks like rain in the soft sunshine. The old grandmother is thinking
when she first heard the song, and of the voice that sang it, when a
light-haired and light-hearted girl she hung around that mother's
chair, nor saw the shadows of the years to come. O! the days that are
no more! What spell can we weave to bring them back again? What words
can we unsay, what deeds undo, to set back, just this once, the
ancient clock of time?
So all our little hands were forever clinging to her garments, and
staying her as if from dying, for long ago she had done living for
herself, and lived alone in us. But the old kitchen wants a presence
to-day, and the rush-bottomed chair is tenantless.
How she used to welcome us when we were grown, and came back once more
to the homestead.
We thought we were men and women, but we were children there. The
old-fashioned grandmother was blind in the eyes, but she saw with her
heart, as she always did. We threw our long shadows through the open
door, and she felt them as they fell over her form, and she looked
dimly up and saw tall shapes in the door-way, and she says, "Edward I
know, and Lucy's voice I can hear, but whose is that other? It must be
Jane's," for she had almost forgotten the folded hands. "Oh, no, not
Jane, for she--let me see--she is waiting for me, isn't she?" and the
old grandmother wandered and wept.
"It is another daughter, grandmother, that Edward has brought," says
some one, "for your blessing."
"Has she blue eyes, my son? Put her hand in mine, for she is my latest
born, the child of my old age. Shall I sing you a song, children?" Her
hand is in her pocket as of old; she is idly fumbling for a toy, a
welcome gift to the children that have come again.
"Come, children, sit around the fire. Shall I sing you a song, or tell
you a story? Stir the fire, for it is cold; the nights are growing
colder."
The clock in the corner struck nine, the bed-time of those old days.
The song of life was indeed sung, the story told, it was bed-time at
last. Good night to thee, grandmother! The old-fashioned grandmother
was no more, and we miss her forever. But we will set up a tablet in
the midst of the memory, in the midst of the heart, and write on it
only this:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF THE
OLD-FASHIONED GRANDMOTHER.
GOD BLESS HER FOR EVER.
CHAPTER IV.
OUT-DOOR PREACHING.
The miracle of Spring is beginning.
Leafless, indeed, stand the great woods, and shivering in the cold
North wind. The joints of rheumatic oaks creak dismally, and there is a
moan in the maples. The skeleton orchards are gray and brown upon the
Southern slopes, but the sun is shining and the clock of Time ticks in
the heart of May. A January fire rolls and roars up the chimney's
capacious throat; the water-pail is nightly glazed with ice, but the
birds are abroad and their songs are in all the air. Not a wisp of hay
remains in the wide, deep bay of the barn, and the cows decline "to
give down," and the lambs are going where the good lambs go, though the
lilacs are budding and the willows have fringed the streams with green.
How full of the dear old music of Summer are wood, orchard and field.
Even the great empty barn, with its ribs of oak, is a-twitter with
swallows that dart in and out at the diamond doors in the gables, and
the mud-walled cottages that are built along the rafters. The robins
are singing the self-same song they sang a thousand years ago, and the
finches are untarnished and golden as ever. Down by the marsh the
bobo'-links are ringing their little bells, and swinging to and fro
upon the little bushes that sway in the wind. The brown thrushes have
built their nests in the fence-corners and the heaps of brush; a
Baltimore oriole flickered like a flake of fire through the garden,
this morning, and drifted away behind the barn; we frightened up a
whip-poor-will yesterday, from among the withered leases, and found a
blue-bird's nest with a single egg in a hollow stump in the pasture. A
little gray couple are busy building in the cleft of the bar-post, and
a small Trojan in speckled jacket is about to keep house on the loaded
end of the well-sweep that goes up forty times a day and comes down
with a bang. Why didn't the little idiot take up his quarters in the
bucket! A fortnight ago, John hung his jacket upon the fence, and
to-day he shook out from one of the pockets a nest, and two eggs as
blue as the sky.
There is singing everywhere: from the tuft of gray grass there comes a
small tune of two notes and a rest, then two more; from the second rail
of the fence a gush of melody; from the roof-ridge, a solo; from the
depths of the air, as of angel calling unto angel. The birds and the
buds make it May, and May it shall be.
Yesterday was Sunday, as clear and as cool as charity, and yesterday I
got into good company for once in a way, and went to church in the
woods. The gray temple that God built looked dull and empty as I
approached, but as I entered, the birds were singing an anthem and
Nature had begun to work a miracle.
Last winter we floundered to the January service, and the drifts, how
huge they were, and the white arms of the forest were stretched out in
silent benediction, stern and cold, like the blessing of old Puritans.
Now, the earth is strewn with withered leaves of a gone summer that
rustled articulately beneath the thoughtful foot, and said, as words
can never say it: "In the midst of life we are in death," and thus the
Sermon began.
And then the birds all around joined in to sing, and the wood-dove to
mourn with her mate, and so this passage of Scripture was read out:
"The winter is over and gone; the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land."
And after that, two sparrows who were blown away last autumn by the
keen Northeaster, and that nobody thought to see again, sang a simple
song, the burden whereof was, "Not a sparrow falleth to the ground
without Him."
A delicate white flower, that had lifted away a counterpane of damp
gray leaves, stood up in its place at the foot of a great tree, and
what did we have then, but "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not
quickened except it die. Behold, I show you a mystery! we shall not all
sleep, but we shall all be changed."
And the little stars of pink and white flowers that were clustered in a
constellation about the mossy rock, lifted up their voices and sang,
even as they did in Time's morning: "There is one glory of the sun, and
another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star
differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of
the dead." And thus the doctrine was demonstrated, and a robin that
minute began to sing.
Then there went noiselessly over the dead leaves as they lay, and over
the preachers, and over them that prayed, a small shadow; and, looking
up, a white breath of cloud was drifting by, and it said as it went,
"Thus passeth human life," and the wind breathed a low sigh, and the
service went on.
And all the while the birds were busy as busy could be, carrying
timbers and tapestry and couches of down for the homes they were
building, and one sang as she wrought, "The better the day," and her
mate took it up with "The better the deed," and the Sabbath unbroken
shone on.
A few bees, brave as their fellows that dared the dead lion of old
Samson's time, went trumpeting along the neighboring fields, a feeble
charge against the living lion of the North. Walking along the grand
old aisles upon whose floor last summer's dead were lying, let us
recall the time before the first snow fell, and the relenting year
looked back and smiled, so sad and sweet a smile, even as our dead who
stand sometimes upon the holy threshold of a dream; when the last
breath of those dead leaves went heavenward like a prayer, and Indian
Summer charmed the drowsy earth and golden air. But there is no dying
now. The graves are opened! Lo, the violet comes; the lady-slippers
dance upon the air while wild Sweet Williams stand admiring by.
Grand sermons preached they all, of faith and hope and beauty yet to
be, and as you turned away, there in the field a passage from the
Sermon on the Mount, wrapped in green silk, was lying, and what was it
but, "Behold the lilies of the field, how they grow, they toil not,
neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
like one of these."
So with fragments of sermons and snatches of songs strewn along the
way, you leave the temple of the Lord and bear away with you some of
the preachers and some of the singers and some of the beauties of the
great congregation in that mighty minster. You dismantle a fallen tree
of one of Nature's studies, a broad green mat of moss, a piece of
velvet from the very loom that wove the glory of morning, and bear it
home for Sunday Reading. Perusing it awhile, you wonder you could ever
have set foot on such a dainty piece of work, for there, written in
God's "fine hand," are maple groves and close-fed pastures for some
tiny herd; and little pines like filaments of feathers; and emerald
hills full-crowned with woods; and in small valleys, like dimples in a
baby's cheek, a mimic lily, as starlight in a tear; the least of Alps
with sand-grain cliffs; spears for atomies, tipped with a drop of red;
trees a full round inch in height, touched at the top with something
like a sunset; a clover-field broad as a linnet's wing, and tufts of
shrubs that might hide a hunted gnat from some small sportsman in those
mimic fields; a landscape done in little; a picture Nature painted on
Holidays and Sundays, and so hid death that, in some fallen tree, lay
like a Titan all abroad.
And this bright landscape fair as Eden land, unrolled upon a dinner
plate, was served up for Love-of-Beauty's feast, where Fancy sat as
guest, and Hope stood by. How earnest Nature is in all she does; how
finished, all her work from moss to mountain. The tint on girlhood's
lip is well laid on, indeed, but with no greater care than set these
rubies in the green fields of Moss-land.
And so that plate of moss "reads like a book." A month ago those pines
were not; nay, the small mountain where they grow was not embossed upon
the velvet, and here you look upon the _programme_ of what Earth
shall be--the finished miracle of Spring; what Earth shall be, despite
complaint and evil prophecy.
Take Nature at her word, even as the birds that trust her, and so toil
and sing though snows have drifted to the heart of May. Look not abroad
for token that the end is near. No telescope shall ever bring to view
time's brown October. But when the birds forget to build their summer
homes and bless the woods, and roses lose their flush and fragrance;
when on just such another scroll of mossy landscape as you are reading
now, no promises are made, then know that earnest Nature has wearied of
her work and seeks a Holiday at last.
CHAPTER V.
THE STORY OF THE BELL.
The Roman knight who rode, all accoutred as he was, into the gulf, and
the mouth of the hungry Forum closed upon him and was satisfied,
vanquished, in his own dying, that great Philistine, Oblivion, which,
sooner or later, will conquer us all.
But there is an old story that always charmed me more. In some strange
land and time they were about to cast a bell for a mighty tower; a
hollow, starless heaven of iron. It should toll for dead monarchs--"the
king is dead!"--and make glad clamor for the new prince--"long live the
king!" It should proclaim so great a passion or so grand a pride that
either would be worship, or, wanting these, forever hold its peace.
Now this bell was not to be digged out of the cold mountains; it was to
be made of something that had been warmed with a human touch or loved
with a human love. And so the people came like pilgrims to a shrine,
and cast their offerings into the furnace and went away. There were
links of chains that bondmen had worn bright, and fragments of swords
that had broken in heroes' hands. There were crosses and rings and
bracelets of fine gold; trinkets of silver and toys of poor red copper.
They even brought things that were licked up in an instant by the red
tongues of flame; good words they had written and flowers they had
cherished; perishable things that could never be heard in the rich tone
and volume of the bell.
And the fires panted like a strong man when he runs a race, and the
mingled gifts flowed down together and were lost in the sand, and the
dome of iron was drawn out like leviathan.
And by-and-by the bell was alone in its chamber, and its four windows
looked forth to the four quarters of heaven. For many a day it hung
dumb; the winds came and went, but they only set it a sighing; birds
came and went, and sang under its eaves, but it was an iron horizon of
dead melody still. All the meaner strifes and passions of men rippled
on below it. They out-groped the ants, and out-wrought the bees, and
out-watched the Chaldean shepherds, but the chamber of the bell was as
dumb as the pyramids.
At last there came a time when men grew grand for right and truth, and
stood shoulder to shoulder over all the land, and went down like
reapers to the harvest of death; looked into the graves of them that
slept, and believed there was something grander than living; glanced on
into the far future and discerned there was something bitterer than
dying, and so, standing between the quick and the dead, they quitted
themselves like men.
Then the bell woke in its chamber, and the great waves of its music
rolled gloriously out and broke along the blue walls of the world like
an anthem; and every tone in it was familiar as a household word to
somebody, and he heard it and knew it with a solemn joy. Poured into
that fiery furnace-heart together, the humblest gifts were blent in one
great wealth, and accents feeble as a sparrow's song grew eloquent and
strong; and lo, a people's stately soul heaved on the tenth wave of a
mighty voice!
We thank GOD in this our day for the furnace and the fire; for the
offerings of gold and the trinkets of silver; for the good deed and the
true word; for the great triumph and the little song.
CHAPTER VI.
"MY EYE!"
That sounds like slang, and I have quoted it lest somebody should
think it original; but then there is really no more slang in it, as I
apply it, than there is in Agur's prayer--the man who wanted what
could be spared precisely as well as not, and who proposed to make his
pantaloons without any pockets. The application changes the nature.
Thus, I spread mustard upon a piece of linen and clap it upon the nape
of a fellow's neck, and it is a blister. I veneer therewith a pink and
white slice of Israelitish abomination, and protect it with a thin
section of bread, and it is--oh, blessed transformation!--it is a
sandwich! So with the topmost phrase of this chapter; a boy without
any brim to his hat shouts it in the street, and it is slang; but I
take it to christen an essay as full of eyes as Juno's Argus,
and--_presto!_--it becomes a Christian name.
Perhaps there is nothing of which there is so many--if we except
blades of grass and grains of sand--as eyes. From the potato that
watches you _perdu_ from its native hill, to a peacock's tail, about
everything is gifted with an eye. There's the eye you put the thread
through, and the eye which you catch with a hook, my girl, when
you used to fasten your dress behind; and the eye of Day, and the
Daisy, my poet; and the "dry eye," which we have been told once or
twice that congregations were entirely out of. There's a violet in
the garden-border with an eye of blue. There's a fly on the
window-pane--six legs, and "eyes" enough in its head to carry any
question with an overwhelming affirmative. There's "Black-eyed Susan,"
in the play, that makes you hum "All in the Downs the fleet was
moored," and snuff salt water, and make a fool of yourself. I can
recall but three things at the moment so poor as not to be blessed
with at least two eyes: the needle, the Cyclops, and the man of one
idea!
Homer--one of him--says Juno was ox-eyed; and though, from all
accounts, Juno was rather a coarse creature, yet everybody has taken to
likening his love to somebody's "nigh" ox; and there is something
beautiful in the great lamp-like eyes of an amiable creature that comes
meekly under the yoke and never makes complaint. Like Darwin's
_other_ monkeys, we are all imitative animals; and how many of us
would ever have thought to look into a bullock's eyes at all if the
blind native of seven cities had not set the example, nobody can tell;
but then it is the Greek fashion to praise the women and the oxen in
the same breath.
"Ladies and gentlemen, here is one of the most _ve_racious animals
that swims in the sea. He follers ships if so be somebody may be
throwed overboard!"
The speaker was a rough man, with one arm and a grizzled lip. The
subject of his discourse lay in a tank of water, and watched him as he
talked. The thing was a sea-tiger, and resembled an exaggerated seal.
Its large, round, dark head was lifted out of the water; but that head
was illuminated by a pair of the most splendid eyes in the world. I can
not say there was any trace of _soul_ in them, albeit there might
be a tender memory of the soles of the copper-toed shoes of the last
little boy he had masticated and swallowed; but ah, those eyes!--they
were large and gentle and pensive. You wouldn't have been a bit
surprised had he burst out with one of Moore's melodies about
"No pearl ever lay under Oman's green water."
If the keeper was as "veracious" as he declared the tiger was, of a
truth those eyes were the most mendacious couple that ever kept
company. If there is no surviving relative to object, I should like to
call one of them Ananias and the other Sapphira. It was a case of love
at first sight. Such wistful, melting glances as that miserable beast
turned upon the ladies who shook their fans at him, and the little
children who "made eyes" at him in return, nobody but a captivating
woman could hope to rival.
The dingy plaster wall of a smoke-house is as utterly blank as your
last lottery ticket. Now fancy the dirty leather apron of some son of
Vulcan hung ignobly thereon, and then fancy, as you look at it, an
impossible eye breaking out all at once in an improbable place in that
wall and close to the apron--an eye small, twinkling, uncertain, and
you have the expression of an elephant's countenance. And yet we boys
and girls have all been led up to Columbus, Hannibal, Romeo, and the
rest of them, and bidden to mark the sagacious glitter of that sinister
crevice. The word "sagacity" is completely ruined for all human uses.
It belongs to the baggage-smashers of the brute creation; and whenever
you read of some "sagacious" statesman you immediately think of an
elephant. Without the intelligence of a horse or the affection of a
dog, and with no beauty either of mould or motion, the beast's eye
tells the story of what Cooper's Sachem calls "the hog with two tails."
The remembrance of an eye is the most tenacious of memories. You may
forget the fashion of face and figure, but if
"There's a light in the window for thee,"
the expression of an eye will sometimes be all that remains to you of a
dead friend. There it is that the soul comes the nearest to escaping.
There it is more nearly undressed and out of doors than it can possibly
be any where else without dying.
"Was Aaron Burr tall?" asked one woman of another who once saw that
recreant "child of many prayers" just for one moment at Albany.
"I don't know," was the reply; "but such a glance as he gave you! I
have always remembered him as the man with the living eyes." Ah, the
flash of the soul's artillery has photographic powers beyond the art of
the artist, and _its_ proofs, of all the printing in the world are
imperishable!
Do you remember the pretty pebbles you used to gather out of the beds
of the brooks--the notes of the sweet low tune they ran by? Dripping
from the water, they were red rubies and green garnets and golden opals
and blue sapphires--precious stones every one; but the glory and
glamour of the brooks once gone, they grew dim and dull and valueless.
It is so with human eyes. You can not always be sure of their color. A
pale, light eye may deepen and darken, when the soul is stirred behind
it, till you declare it black as midnight; and a brown eye may be
fairly bleached blue in the light and fire of passion. The elder
Booth's eyes were all colors in a night; and Charlotte Cushman's, as
Meg Merrilies, kindled into a broad white blaze, like a pine-knot fire.
A nose brought to an edge, and a couple of small black eyes, form, as
astrologers say, "an inauspicious conjunction." Such eyes are apt to
_snap_, a dreadful hemlock quality, to which a strabismus, so violent
that the vicious members seem trying to get at each other under the
bridge of the nose, is a blessing and a beauty. Let us not be
censorious. Let us wish the owners of all such eyes a great deal of
self-control, or a little of the grace of God.
But whatever you do, I pray you never call anybody's eyes "orbs,"
unless you are re-writing Milton's Paradise Lost. And don't call them
"organs." There was a country printer and editor whose wristbands would
have been always in mourning with his hands, if he had worn a shirt,
and who always had a stale copy of his paper sticking out of a
side-pocket, and smelling musty--for he used poor ink and poor ideas to
match--and he was forever talking of his "organ," wherever he was, and
quoting from his "organ," until people laughed about it, and said
"there was a complete outfit for some itinerant Italian with musical
proclivities. There was an 'organ,' and there was a monkey, and nothing
lacking but the man to grind it, and a piece of green baize!" If you
wish to know about a word, set the children to using it. Fancy little
Johnny's cry of "Oh, I've got something in my organs!" or a sound of
lamentation in Ramah--leastwise in the door-yard--with Jenny's wail
that her sun-bonnet keeps tumbling over her orbs! When children and
grown folks talk alike, and the boy speaks as if he were crazy, you may
be sure the man talks as if he were a fool.
I had a friend. He was murdered in Illinois. The man that killed him
was never so true to anybody as was this friend to me and mine. He was
buried without song or sermon. He has gone to a good place, if he has
gone _any_where. I am not certain, but I _hope_ so, for there was too
much genuine nobility about him to perish utterly away--to be snuffed
out like a candle, as if he had never been. His name was--PEDRO. His
eyes, dark in the shadow, russet in the sun, talked English all the
while. Wronged by word or blow, they pleaded for him with a touching
pathos. Caressed, they laughed and sparkled like living fountains.
Stretched upon the threshold in the genial sun, a large human content
worth praying for shone in his eyes. There was a great deal too much
meaning in them for a creature whose "spirit goeth downward," and
almost enough for a being with a soul to be saved. What gave those eyes
their eloquence? Did the mere machinery of a dog's life light them up
so wonderfully, wistfully, sorrowfully? There were love in them, and
hope and abiding trust and an honest heart. What lacked he to entitle
him to two names like a Christian, instead of one? He knew plenty of
people with whom he never could have exchanged qualities without
getting the worst of the bargain. But he did better than to be a
contemptible man, for he was a noble dog. His eyes look inquiringly,
wistfully, after me through the shadows of the years that are past.
They are the immortal part of him. They will last out a human memory.
Hereaway! PEDRO! Hereaway!
The kernel of the proverb, "Love me, love my dog," is that you are
getting pretty near a man when you have made friends with his dog. Now,
I hate "black and tans," the tantivying creatures, their mouths full of
needles, a bark as sharp as a razor, and the whole case of instruments
on all sides of you at once; but I insist that I love dogs. "Black and
tans" are _not_ dogs; they are cutlery.
And now, to come right home and make a personal matter of it, this
gossip would never have seen the light had I not suffered the temporary
loss of one eye, and that set me thinking. Our "body servants," the
most of them, came into the world as Noah's caravan went into the
ark--in _pairs_. Two hands, two feet, two ears, two eyes; and they
are matched spans, every one. The truth is, I never thought much about
having any eyes at all until one of them went under a cloud. None of us
do. A man never feels his ears, no matter how long they are, while they
_work_ well, unless he lays hold of them with his hands. With some
men, though, their ears are their "best hold." So with the eyes. When
the sight is keen and clear, we just take in day and its glories, and
the charm of color, and the witchery of shadow, we hardly know how. We
_feel_ them no more than we do the window-panes through which come
the sunset and the starlight. But let something go wrong, and you are
brought to a lively sense of possession in a twinkling. You begin to
discover how rich you were without knowing it, and what an incalculable
blessing you would lose if only one eye should be extinguished. I
breathed air one night, a while ago, that eight hundred friendly people
had just breathed for me; and I stood with my left shoulder to an open
window with a chill breeze through it, and my left eye fell to weeping
for the folly of the thing; and then impalpable crows began to build a
nest of most palpable sticks, and fairly filled the unfortunate eyrie
until it ceased to be a window, and became a--_rookery_! And the
eye was closed until the unseemly birds could be persuaded to build
elsewhere.
I think, if you touch a man's eye roughly, you come within one of
touching his soul; and I came to think at times that the crows were
foraging in my perceptive faculties for material wherewith to put my
eye out.
The first thing done was to pickle the offending member in strong
brine, as if it were an onion; but the miserable business of corvine
nidification went on. Had you thrust both those hard words into my eye
together, it couldn't have hurt me a bit worse than the crows did.
Having made pickles, it was thought best to put up a sardine or two.
Flax seed was expressed and impressed in an oleaginous bag, whose
slippery contents wriggled about on the tremulous lid like a packet of
angle-worms. But the crows liked linseed and kept on. Things looked
serious, as far as I could see them with a solitary eye; but there was
a comfort: if I had half as many eyes, I had twice as many friends, and
they were tender-hearted women. I was a sort of Mungo Park, in a small
way, only I had a wife to look into my eye whenever I asked her, which
was every few minutes; and I wasn't in Africa, and I didn't lie under a
tree, and my female friends were not negroes, and they didn't sing,
"He has no mother to bring him milk,
No wife to grind his corn."
With these exceptions I was _precisely_ like Mungo Park. The ladies
were solicitous and helpful. One suggested bread and milk; it was
brought and set upon the top of the stove. Another, an alum curd; it
was made and set under the stove. A third, Thompson's Eye-water; it
was brought and thrown into the stove. A fourth, Pettit's Eye-salve;
it appeared and was set upon the table.
Sandwiches were pronounced good; and hand-breadths of mustard, tawnier
than the river Tiber, were spread behind my ears, and a careless crow
dropped a stick or two. It was getting too warm for them, but I could
not see why. In fact, I couldn't see much of anything. It grew warm; it
waxed hot. The skin rolled up like tattered bits of parchment, and the
sandwich lunch was over.
It was time to call the Doctor. He came. Shrewd, skillful, patient, he
mastered the situation. He saw the dishes of sea-water standing about,
and the bags of linseed, and the plasters of mustard, and the alum
curds, and the lotions, and the unguents, and he fell upon my eye, and
he opened it as a Baltimore boy opens an oyster. He got no help from
me; but he saw the crows. Looking about, he took a rapid inventory of
what there was in the room that had not already been put into my eye.
He gazed inquiringly at the bureau and a large rocking-chair. The sheet
of zinc on which the stove stood arrested his attention. "You haven't
used that, have you?" "No," said I; and he whipped out a little bottle,
said "_Zinc_," shook it, pried open my eye with an earnestness
that would not be denied, and poured the zinc square into it. Did you
ever lie on your back in the bottom of a shot-tower when they were
raining lead? If you never did, you don't want to. And then the Doctor
rolled my unfortunate optic about like a billiard ball, until the
liquid was swashed over the whole surface. I thought then, and I still
think, he meant to burn up the crows' nest, possibly the crows. That
eye was better; the birds dropped a few more sticks; but they hung
about the old place still.
It was then thought best to give the cellar the usual spring cleaning,
and feed the pig with the product. Rotten apples were recommended; and
a Russet, that needed to be sent to the cooper's, leaned lazily over to
one side on a little plate, ready for use.
A kind lady from Massachusetts, for whose interest I shall always be
grateful, said that hen and chickens were good--hen and chickens
smothered in cream. That puzzled me. It was too late for hens and too
early for chickens. But the lady set a dozen pairs of little nimble
feet flying about the neighborhood for the poultry; and one day she
came, bringing a handful of small, green plants, chuckle-headed and
cunning, and the secret of the fowls was out. They were "house-leeks."
The brood was put in a tumbler and placed upon the bureau.
But the mischief went on in the aviary. I think one of the crows was
setting, ready to lay or hatch, or something, while the other was
building a door-yard fence. It was the ninth day, when even puppies
pass the limit of total eclipse, and something must be done. Another
lady, also from the Bay State, proposed, as the cooking and baking had
been done, and the pig comforted, that we should feed the--_sheep_!
She named carrots. The girls down stairs were set to washing carrots,
and the procession of the golden vegetable began to move. First, a boy
with a carrot in his claw, like Jupiter's eagle with a thunderbolt in
his talon. Then a lady with a carrot on a tea-plate. Then a man with
an immense fellow on a platter. Then more carrots. Last, a grater, and
the business began. My patient, anxious wife sat up all night grating
carrots. It sounded, in the middle watches, like the rasp of a distant
saw-mill. Everything was the color of Ophir. For twenty-four hours,
once in eighteen minutes, did she apply that carrot; and the crows
began to grow uneasy. Their nest began to tumble to pieces. The
repeated and tremendous assaults proved too much for them. The eye
that had looked like an angry moon in a watery sky began to clear up,
and recover its blue-white porcelain look once more.
The bandage was whipped off; but the team didn't pull even. My right
eye had gone ahead in the business of seeing, and straightened the
traces till they twanged like fiddle-strings. The left eye was drooping
and languid. Things had a cloudy look. I saw two doctors, when only one
had come in. I had two wives, with a face apiece, growing on a single
stem, like a couple of cherries. My Massachusetts friends came in with
their doubles. But the worst of it was, I had four feet, like a
quadruped. Think of the expense! Imagine the boots! It was a worry. But
I began this article. The crows are taking flight--to return, I trust,
in the only English Poe's raven ever knew--"nevermore."
I am indebted to the Doctor and I always mean to be. There can be no
doubt that he made those crows uneasy. The zinc was worse than the
crows, and they could not abide peacefully in one place. He has gone
into the eye-business altogether, for he is a Surgeon in the Navy. He
is going to _sea_.
The brightest May sun breaks out of the cloud. It kindles the hills; it
touches up the woods, just ready to bud. A robin sings that same old
song by the window.
Thank GOD for Light. His resplendent creation--Light, that came into
being the moment He called it, like an instant and ready angel,
watching at His feet.
Thank GOD for eyes--the most delicate and exquisite of all our
servants. Let us be Persians, and worship the Sun. Let us be
Israelites, and pray with our faces toward the EAST.
CHAPTER VII.
THE OLD ROAD.
In almost every old neighborhood there is an old road, disused and half
forgotten, and we like to get away from the traveled thoroughfare, and
wander, in a summer's day, along its deserted route.
Our grandfathers had a species of indomitable directness in making
roads and making love that was wonderful to see. They did not believe
in the line of beauty; there was nothing curvilinear about them, either
in word or deed. They went by square and compass, and life and religion
were laid out like Solomon's Temple. And so, straight over the hill,
and right through the big timber, and plump into the swamp, and bounce
over the "corduroy," went the old road.
Its long bridges are broken and mossy now, and brown birds in white
waistcoats build nests beneath them, undisturbed by the small thunder
of the rumbling wheels.
Nobody goes that way, not even the boys bound out for school; for, ever
so many years ago, in a November day, they have heard, a stranger went
down by the old mill--you can see the rim of its dry gray wheel from
here--and was never heard of more.
Years after, among the hemlocks, human bones were found, and to this
day, on windy nights, groans come out of the gulf, and the troubled
ghost is thought to be walking still.
Over yonder are a broad-disked sunflower and a heap of stone. The
latter was once a hearth, for a house stood there, and after the
stranger disappeared the tenant grew suddenly rich, as the times went,
and showed gold with unknown words upon it, that none of the neighbors
could make out, and pretty soon he took all that he had and went West;
as some said to the "Genesee Country," and others to "the Ohio," which
was yet more like a dream than the Genesee.
After that, nobody would live in the house, and it grew ruinous, and
was haunted, and people saw a light there in dark nights, or thought
they did, and the children shunned it, except in the brightest of
mornings, when the sun was shining and the birds were singing, and the
cows went lowing, Indian file, to the pasture; and after awhile, the
old house tumbled down and crumbled away. Such stories thrive along old
roads, even as the Mayweed, and the thistles, that nobody ever cuts,
and on whose pink tops the yellow-birds rock up and down, like little
boats at anchor, till the Fall winds whistle away the golden birds and
the white down.
Even the brooks that used to tinkle across the track and under the
little bridges, have somehow run dry, or gone another way, and you will
see an old trough, dusty and bleached, by the roadside, the strip of
bark, that brought the water from the hills, broken and scattered, and
the earth worn hard and smooth with the tramping of many feet. Very
long ago, a tin cup used to hang there, tethered with a string, for the
sake of thirsty travelers. We like to stand by the deserted place,
where only a broken thread of ice-cold water trickles its way down to
the roadside, and fancy how eagerly, in the broad summer days, the
horses, panting through the heavy sand and up the rocky hills, thrust
their noses deep into the overflowing trough of crystal coolness,
while, now and then, the cautious drivers pulled up their heads with a
jerk, until they heard the long-drawn breath of inarticulate content.
We like to think that the dripping cup was borne to bearded lips that
were eloquent and true of old, and lips, maybe, of beauty, that are
dusty and dumb to-day; that bees from the shimmering fields came
bugling thither, and crept, with dainty feet, along the trough's damp
edge; that birds sat there, and drank and rendered their little thanks,
and rode away upon the billowy air; that now and then a squirrel, red
and sleek, with snowy throat, flashed chattering along the zigzag
rails, and flashed away again; or a gray rabbit, with little noiseless
leap and listening ears, took hurried draughts and squatted among the
alders till the panting dog had lapped the nectar of the wayside
spring.
There, where the Maple wears its crown, a lazy gate is swinging in the
wind, sole relic of a fence that straggled round a home, of which the
weedy, tangled hollow alone gives proof.
It may have been some Rachel dwelt therein, who met a second Jacob at
the spring, and Fancy listens for the words they said, not found in
"Ovid's Art of Love,"--the maid a matron, and the matron dead.
And then, strolling thoughtfully along, where the track grows dim, and
loses itself in the grass, we come to the beeches, whereto, we like to
think, glad children once made pilgrimage. That chafed and sturdy limb
has borne a weight more precious than its leaves. Upon the stout old
arm, swayed to and fro like canaries in a ring, swung clusters of
laughing girls and boys, and then beneath it, hand-in-hand, made bows
and courtesies to the passing traveler, while tattered hats of straw
and wool tossed here and there proclaimed the coming stage. Ah! there
_were_ days when, over the old road, ran the yellow, mud-stained
coach; laboring up its hills, and pitching along its log-ways, and
lurching in its deep-worn tracks, and rattling down its steeps, and
splashing through its brooks.
And there, in that roofless dwelling, whose clap-boards rattle in the
wind, behold "the stage house" of the elder time. Very grand people
used to get out of that stage sometimes, and quite as grand were the
dinners that the bustling landlady and her girls set forth. Then it was
that the blacksmith, in his dusty shop across the road, was wont to
lean upon his hammer, and discuss the merits of wheel-horse and leader.
You can see, even to this day, the burned and blackened ring in the
greensward where he used to "set the tire." Of the smithy and the man,
no other trace remains.
Children sometimes wander out to the old road, and wonder where it
leads, and whether to the end of the world; and we delight to join them
in conjecture; to think what stalwart men they were, that, ax in hand,
so bravely cut their way through the dim resounding woods, and rolled
their cabins up; to think what "beauty" and what "beast" in elder times
did pass along this road; what laughter echoed and what jests went
round; that canvas-covered wains in many a camp were scattered towards
the West, and red fires twinkled through the leafy tents; that soldiers
in some old campaign, and ponderous cannon went that way to battle, and
returned at last, but _fewer_ than they went. This was the route
of them, perhaps, who founded cities in the brave young West, its
future sinews and its coming men; of newly-wedded pairs bound for the
later Canaan; of murderers hastening from the hue and cry.
Across its beaten path the deer have trooped, the Indian noiseless
stole, the forest shadows fallen at high noon. Westward it went to some
great lake, they said, where fields all ready for the plow grew green
to the water's edge, where springs came early and golden autumns
lingered late.
Along that way, trampled beneath the driver's feet, the mail-bag went
and came, and now and then a letter from the West; a great brown sheet,
and traced with awkward pen and faded ink, yet how like a ballad ran
the homely missive: of green March fields, and February flowers; of
Nature's meadows waiting for the scythe; of clustering grapes that
mantled all the woods; of nearest neighbors but two miles apart; of
dreams of plenty and of peace. Blended therewith were memories of home
and words of love sent back, and a little sigh, half breathed, for
faces they never more should see.
What tidings went, sometimes, of fortunes won, and fame, by errant
sons; of girls whose graves were made where the sunbeams rest, "when
they promise a glorious morrow."
Thus slowly to and fro crept the sweet syllables of love, the
untranslated Gospel of the human heart; and, though long on the way,
they never grew chilly or old.
Ah, those letters on huge, buckram foolscap, crackling when you opened
them like a fire in the hemlocks, that used to be written when letters
were as honest as an open palm! Those old, half-naked letters, their
blue ribs showing through, ventured out at long and painful intervals,
were indited "after meeting," and were sure to contain religion, death
or a wedding. The old-time writer, though wicked as Captain Kyd on week
days, was bound to have religion enough in his letter to float it on
Sunday, and he was no hypocrite that did it, for it was the deliberate,
passionless transcript of his better self. Lay side by side an old
letter of 1840 and a new letter of 1874: the one right-angled, neat and
snug in its white or buff jacket, wearing a medallion as if it belonged
to the legion of honor, self-folding, self-sealing, self-paying, and
ready for the road. The other in its shirt-sleeves, broad, long, and
possibly five-cornered, written across its baggy back like a note at
the bank, "for here you see the owner's name,"--an "18-3/4" or a "25"
done in red ink in a corner, and sealed with a pat of shoe-maker's wax
or a little biscuit of dough. But as honest hearts were done up in
those rude letters as ever were set going, and the awkward pages were
more richly illuminated than an old Saint's Legend, with unadorned and
simple friendship.
But over on the new route they have strung the Telegraph, where the
rise of flour and the fall of foes are transmitted by the same flash,
and the price of barley and a priceless blessing go flickering along in
company. The houses on the old road--what few there are left--stand
with their backs to the railway and the telegraph; and the wheeled
World, as it goes thundering by, looks askance upon the back-kitchens
and pig-pens of the old-time.
But the houses on the new road are very new, and smell of paint; the
blinds are very green, and the people very grand. The East and the West
have kissed each other across the Continent, and every body and thing
between is brisk as a flea, and breathless as a king's trumpeter. Even
Consumption has whipped up its pale horse to a gallop, and dashed into
the steeple-chase of the Age.
And year after year the old road grows dimmer, and the grass gets green
across the track, and it is rechristened "the long pasture," and is
surrendered to the lowing herds and the singing birds. In the midst of
a region humming with life, it alone is silent, and almost awakens
human sympathy, so wandering and lost and desolate it is.
Sometimes, as you dust along the turnpike, you can see it as it comes
in sight round a clump of tangled trees, and "makes" as if it would
venture into the new thoroughfare and go somewhere, but it never does,
for, speedily sinking back into the hollow, it is lost among the
willows.
Like a very old memory in the heart is it, and all forget it but the
Year. Spring remembers it, and borders it with green and sprinkles it
with the gold coin of the dandelion and the little stars of the
Mayweed. Summer sends the bees thither to bugle among the
thistle-blows, and the ground-sparrows build in its margins, and the
faded ribbon of yellow sand grows bright in its glowing sun. The winds
waft the breath of the morning over its desolate way, and the rains
long ago beat out the old footprints it used to bear. Autumn sighs as
it follows it through the ravine and among the hemlocks, and the drifts
that Winter heaps are unbroken and stainless.
No bolder feet, old Road, ever left their impress on other pathways; no
truer hearts than hastened on thy rugged way, have ever turned
beautiful in the "better land." If there were ever those whose laugh
was music, then thy woods have heard it. The daughters of the West are
passing fair, but those young brows of old, whose white flashed white
again from thy singing streams, and eyes glanced back to eyes--no
brighter and no purer were ever bent above a classic wave.
Like thee, those brows are furrowed and those eyes are dim. Like thee,
Ambition's line fades from the eye of Time, and like the dusty
"runways" of thy brooks, soft pulses have grown dry and dumb.
CHAPTER VIII.
A BIRD HEAVEN.
Does any theological reason exist why there should not be in some
blessed planet or other a Bird Heaven, a realm where the green gates of
Spring are forever opening and the fruits of Summer are for ever
ripening, whose skies are full of the downiest of clouds and the
softest of songs?
Were I to be constituted the Peter of the gate of that Paradise, there
are very few birds to which free entrance should not be given, except
Cochin China, Shanghai, and Bramah Pootrah hens; the raven should be
admitted for the sake of the poet, and even the owl should have a
hollow tree all to itself, and a meadow of mice for its portion; but
for prowling cats and naughty boys, for snares and for fowlers, there
should be no salvation. No early frosts, no chilling rains, the
cherries all free, and great fields of grain for the pigeons. Birds,
everywhere birds! Not a bush but would have a song in it, all trees
would be "singing trees," and all nests sacred as so many little arks
of the Covenant.
Wicker baskets full of pearls with life in them, emeralds with song in
them, swinging from bending bough, hidden in the grass, rocking among
the rushes, like the little Moses of old, and everybody as loving as
Pharaoh's daughter; no serpent in _this_ Eden to charm; no sky
scarred with arrows, no plumage ruffled by storm--wouldn't it be a
_love_ of a place, that Bird Heaven?
Just a few people that should be forever saying over to themselves,
"not a sparrow falleth to the ground without Him," might live there,
and the eaves, the chimneys and the peak of the barn-rafters should be
full of the twitter of swallows, and the martin-box should never be
untenanted. The gate-post should have a cleft for a wren to dwell in;
the orchard be filled with the homes of the robin and goldfinch, and
the currant-bushes thickly peopled with sparrows; nightingales should
sing the night out, and the larks go heavenward to make song in the
morning. The plaint of the whip-poor-will should be there, and the
mourning of the wood-doves heard from the twilight of the groves.
Flotillas of white sea-fowl should float upon the smooth waters, and
the mote below the edge of the cloud at anchor far up in the noon,
should darken into shape, for an eagle should be there in the sunshine.
The old tree-trunks in the pasture should be the homestead of
blue-birds all the year long, and the lilacs, like the burning bush of
the mountain, should be a-blaze with the wings of red-robin and oriole,
and be not consumed.
Time would forget to go on, and would tarry with June in such a midst.
And the poet who so plaintively asked,
"Where are the birds that sang
An hundred years ago?"
would find them there, with the sweet old song that charmed an humbler
world. And, may be, we should learn the bird language then, and would
know what the robins were saying, and the chirping of sparrows be
turned to the choicest of English.
There in the meadow, all the days in the year, Robert o' Lincoln should
ring his chime of bells; there in the leafy cloisters, "Bob White"
should be incessantly called; there on the nodding thistle-blossoms,
the yellow-bird should ride as the summer wind went gently by.
And what would a June be without roses? And so the sod should be
enameled, and the woods should not be lonely for them. The timid
children of the Rainbow, that fled before the plowshare, should grow
bold again, and start up like young quails from their hiding, and
cluster round the door-stone, and swing themselves up to the roof by
green shrouds of their own, and swing themselves down the damp, mossy
sides of the spring, and be numbered with the household.
And here, to this Bird Heaven, one should come who all his earthly life
long was a loving child of Nature; who saw in the feather fallen from
the blue bird in its flight the tinting of the Hand that touched the
tented sky with azure; in the red bird's glowing wing, the
finger-prints of Him who wove a ribbon of the falling rain, and bound
therewith the cloudy brow of storm: Audubon should come and go at will.
The freedom of the planet should be his.
And the world adjoining, and lying in full sight, should be a Tophet
for the slayers of robins and sparrows; the men whom want of worth
makes "fellows"; who lurk about the woods, in the yet unraveled leaf,
and prowl in the orchards white with the sweet drift of apple-blossoms,
and murder the builders of the homes of song; the ruffians who, in
bright top-boots and game-bag cap-a-pie, return elated with two dead
blue-birds and a lark without a head, who break a thrush's wing, and
misname it "sport," and pass disguised as men. And in that Tophet they
should play Nimrod, with kicking muskets shooting empty air; the crows
should live with them, and Nero to fiddle for them, and a filer of saws
for orchestra; and so, like Alexander the coppersmith, they should be
rewarded "according to their works."
Who can imagine a birdless June, or could love a grove rich as
Vallombrosa in leafy beauty, that sheltered no bird, rustled with no
wings, along whose green corridors floated no little song?
With what elegance of form, grace of motion, brilliancy of coloring,
and sweetness of utterance do they fill the summer world. How like
carrier-doves are they, forever bringing messages of peace from the
bosom of Nature even to our own; and a wintry thing indeed is the
happiness that has no birds in it.
As he can not be altogether evil who cherishes a flower, makes friends
with the little violet until it pleads for him, so they who love birds
for their beauty and song have yet something in themselves that is
lovely.
And this lingering trace of an Eden-born nature gives to the denizens
of the air a commercial value beyond that of the provision market. Who
would think, _without_ thinking, that more than seventeen thousand
song birds are annually sold in New York? The linnets, finches and
thrushes of the Hartz Mountains, the canaries from Antwerp and
Brussels, the skylarks from English fields, and the painted sparrows
from Java are among the multitude. Seventy-five thousand dollars
expended in a single city every year for birds, not to be grilled or
fricasseed, but to be admired for their beauty or loved for their song!
Here are the figures for a single year of this graceful trade in the
city of New York:
12,500 Canaries $31,250
600 Gold Finches 600
75 Blackbirds 525
30 Nightingales 425
600 Linnets 600
100 Skylarks 400
700 Fancy Pigeons, imported 4,000
20 Gold and Silver Pheasants 200
650 Parrots 4,900
300 Birds of Paradise 900
150 Mocking Birds 2,250
600 Java Sparrows 900
250 White and Red Cardinals 575
80 Fire Birds 225
------ -------
17,000 $47,750
In 1873, ninety-five thousand canaries were sold in America--birds
enough to make a golden cloud and hide the sun at high noon. And how
kind it was of Chief Justice Chase to decide, in 1872, that in the
intent of the law imposing a tax upon imported animals, birds were
_not_ animals, and so the wings and the warblers enter the United
States duty free!
Who can help following those wicker cages with their little tenants,
as, borne here and there, they make "the winter of our discontent" a
summer; to some gloomy room with its one window and its narrow strip of
sky; to the chamber of the invalid and the garret of poverty. There,
under the dim sky-light, and there, by the one window, and there, by
the couch of languishing, the captives sit and sing--sing, though no
"sweet South" is blowing, and no soft sky is bending, and no green
branch is rustling; sit and sing while the fall rains beat upon the
panes; while the snows drift white upon the threshold; and then, when,
through the smoky air and the dull window, there comes a gush of
sunshine, what a burst of the old woodland melody there is, till the
listening heart is full of the sweet thoughts of summer, and so they
sing out sorrow's night, and "joy cometh in the morning."
It is with a sort of regret, shared perhaps by nobody else, that I end
these sketches. We always get into the _habit_ of things, and habit
comes to rest easily, like an old garment. I do not now remember much
of anything I was not a little sorry to part with, except a jumping
toothache. But the best thing I can do, after wishing my readers a
pleasant trip by the World on Wheels and a pleasant Station at last,
is to
SWITCH OFF.
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_~Rev. J. M. Gregory, LL.D.,~ President of Illinois Industrial
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_~Edwin P. Whipple, Esq.,~ the distinguished critic, in the Boston
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his quotations. His subjects are eminently practical, and he treats
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_~Rev. Dr. Curry,~ Professor of English Literature, Richmond College,
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Sold by all Booksellers, or will be sent, post-paid, on receipt of
price by the publishers.
* * * * * *
Transcriber's note:
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