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.
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 manœuvering 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: