"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 dreamsIts bright jasper walls I can see,And I fancy but dimly the veil intervenesBetween that fair city and me."
"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 dreamsIts bright jasper walls I can see,And I fancy but dimly the veil intervenesBetween that fair city and me."
"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.
"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 dreamsIts bright jasper walls I can see,And I fancy but dimly the veil intervenesBetween that fair city and me."
"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:
SACREDTO THE MEMORYOF THEWOMAN WITH THE SONGSIN THE NIGHT.
Swift motion is the passion of the age. See a picture, see a statue, see a poem, the questionis, 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 alit-tleshort 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 thathehad; 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 puffforus, the morewepuff. 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—histrain 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 theescapementout 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 hehadknown. 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 adashin 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 bybrevet, 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 letterF. 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.
A Little LageA LITTLE LATE!
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.
"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 Lycurgusesen massewith 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,"veryrich 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 itsinterestto 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 theQuakerplan. 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' butIngen. 'Mong Ingennobody—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 manysinnersnear by. If so, it seemed prudent to get back to the railroad without standing very particularly upon "the order of your going."
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, andhewent. 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, itdidgive 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.
The Railroad is a slanderer. It maligns cities. With few exceptions itsneaksinto 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,nothingexcepted. 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 almostclimatarchic—a presider over climate. That being the onlyhardword 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.
When a man travels, what material baggage he takes isimmaterial, but he leaves behind him a great deal of mental and moralimpedimenta. 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 onairs. 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, orwhatis it?—about asstupida 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, butpoplars! 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 ofindianeer. 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 rackcrowndown. Then he settles to the journey, thinks again, elongates, and puts that hatbrimdown. 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. Itlookslike the kick of a vicious horse, but itisthe 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 isnotJupiter, but he resembles him, for he "nods," and that unhappy tile tumbles, strikes the back of the seat with thethrumof 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 inhats.
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 theticket. 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 smileIn safety lighted her round the Green Isle"—
"On she went, and her maiden smileIn safety lighted her round the Green Isle"—
"On she went, and her maiden smileIn safety lighted her round the Green Isle"—
"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!"
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 wereNorthern IndianaandSouthern 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 asotherssaw 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 theNorthern Indianafound themselves occupants of B again in theSouthern 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 steamerNile, with a bronze-faced old sea-dog for captain; the steamerNile, with two gold crocodiles on the bow for a figure-head; the steamerNileat 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. TheNilewas 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—butElderBennett, 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 nevercouldsay "Association." You can shut your eyes and hear him: "the brethren of theAs-so-sa-shunwill 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 studentthoughtnot, and so put his foot in it andsaid"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.Ihad seen him practice deception upon a quadruped.Theyhad 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!
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 itisa 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 theClarion. 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 beenbrief, 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 Examinerhas 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 hasplumes, 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.
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 Castilesoapat 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 thearrangementof 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—theonlysafe 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."
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 isshapedlike an egg, and itisan 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 necromanticwheat, when here is a humanflowerhatched from an awkward bundle in less than thirty minutes!
When you take a train with aharemin it—I use the word in its originally clean sense—and you have nopersonalinterest 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-roomsdeservewhat winged bed-roomsneed—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.