The Project Gutenberg eBook, The World on Wheels and Other Sketches, by Benjamin F. (Benjamin Franklin) Taylor This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: The World on Wheels and Other Sketches Author: Benjamin F. (Benjamin Franklin) Taylor Release Date: January 24, 2014 [eBook #44745] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD ON WHEELS AND OTHER SKETCHES*** E-text prepared by Chris Curnow and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/cu31924022188266 cover A man sitting on baggage THE GREEN TRAVELER, [See page 62.] titlepage THE WORLD ON WHEELS AND OTHER SKETCHES BY Benj. F. Taylor CHICAGO, S. C. GRIGGS & CO. 1874 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by S. C. GRIGGS & CO., In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. PRINTED AT THE LAKESIDE PRESS, CLARK AND ADAMS STS., CHICAGO. ONLY THIS: The Wheels in this book ran, during the summer of 1873, through the columns of The New York Examiner and Chronicle, to "the head and front of whose offending," the REV. EDWARD BRIGHT, D.D., who gave those wheels "the right of way," the old rolling stock and a miscellaneous cargo is Cordially Consigned. ROLLING STOCK AND BILL OF LADING. THE WORLD ON WHEELS. CHAPTER. PAGE. I. The "Wheel" Instinct 13 II. The Concord Coach 17 III. The Raging Canal 23 IV. The Iron Age 30 V. The Iron Horse 35 VI. Plunging into the Wilderness 45 VII. Vicious Animals 51 VIII. Habits of Engines and Train-Men 60 IX. In the Saddle 68 X. Racing and Plowing 74 XI. Snow Bound 82 XII. Scalded to Death 89 XIII. All Aboard! 94 XIV. Early and Late 103 XV. Dead Heads 112 XVI. Working "By the Day" 118 XVII. A Slanderer and a Weather Maker 123 XVIII. Dreaming on the Cars 128 XIX. "Meet Me by Moonlight" 136 XX. The Maker of Cities 144 XXI. A Caboose Ride 150 XXII. Hatching out a Woman 154 XXIII. A Flank Movement 159 XXIV. Light and Shade 162 XXV. Precious Cargoes 168 BAGGAGE. I. My Starry Days 175 II. "No. 104,163" 193 III. Our Old Grandmother 206 IV. Out-Door Preaching 216 V. The Story of the Bell 223 VI. "My Eye!" 226 VII. The Old Road 241 VIII. A Bird Heaven 251 ILLUSTRATIONS. The Green Traveler Frontispiece. The Concord Coach 19 The Baggage Smasher 63 A Little Late 110 Baggage 173 Switch Off 258 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. CHAPTER I. THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT. The perpetual lever called a wheel is the masterpiece of mechanical skill. At home on sea and land, like the feet of the Proclaiming Angel, it finds a fulcrum wherever it happens to be. It is the alphabet of human ingenuity. You can spell out with the wheel and the lever—and the latter is only a loose spoke of that same wheel—pretty much everything in the Nineteenth Century but the Christian Religion and the Declaration of Independence. Having thought about it a minute more, I am inclined to except the exceptions, and say they translate the one and transport the other. Were you ever a boy? Never? Well, then, my girl, wasn't one of your first ambitions a finger-ring? And there is your wheel, with a small live axle in it! But whatever you are, did you ever know a boy worth naming and owning who did not try to make a wheel out of a shingle, or a board, or a scrap of tin? Maybe it was as eccentric as a comet's orbit, and only wabbled when it was meant to whirl, but it was the genuine curvilinear aspiration for all that. Boys, young and old, "take to" wheels as naturally as they take to sin. I am sorry for the fellow that never rigged a water-wheel in the spring swell of the meadow brook, or mounted a wind-mill on the barn gable, or drew a wagon of his own make. My sympathies do not extend to his lack of a velocipede, which is nothing if not a bewitched and besaddled wheelbarrow. In fact, it seems to be the tendency of everything to be a wheel. There's your tumbling dolphin, and there's your whirling world. The conqueror whose hurry set on fire the axles of his chariot was no novelty. Who knows that the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis, lighting up the sky about the polar circles in the night-time, may not be the flashes from the glowing axles of the planet? Who knows that the ice and snow may not be piled up about the Arctic and Antarctic just to keep the flaming gudgeons as cool as possible? Does Sir John Franklin? Does anybody? Take an old man's memory. Only give it a touch, and it turns like a wheel between his two childhoods, and 1810 comes round before you can count the spokes, and 1874 hardly out of sight. When they made narrow wooden hands with slender wrists, and called them oars, and galleys swept the Eastern seas in a grave and stately way, they did well. When they fashioned broad and ghastly palms of canvas that laid hold upon the empty air, and named them sails, they did better. When they grouped around an axle the iron hands that buffeted the waves and put the sea, discomfited, rebuked, behind the flying ship, they had their wheel, and they did best! A one-horse wagon—for nothing was buggy then, but neglected bedsteads—artistically bilious, and striped like a beetle, with a paneled box high before and behind, like an inverted chapeau, and a seat with a baluster back, softened and graced with a buffalo robe, warm in winter—and in summer also—was one of the wheeled wonders of my boyhood. No sitting in that wagon like a right-angled triangle—room in front for any possible length of leg, and a foot- stove withal—room behind for two or three handfuls of children, and a little hair-trunk with a bit of brass-nail alphabet on the cover. Curiously enough, the wagon was owned by that noble Baptist pioneer of the New York North Woods, Elder—not Reverend but revered—John Blodgett, and in it he used to traverse "East road," and "West road," and "Number Three road," and go to Denmark and Copenhagen and Leyden and Turin, and other places in foreign parts, without shipping a sea, or, to borrow a morsel of thunder, without "seeing a ship." His was the voice of "John crying in the wilderness"—John, the Beloved disciple, he surely was. Before he went to "the Ohio," for that is what they called it in the years ago, he preached a farewell to the saddened friends, "Sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more," and then some Christians, some children and some sinners accompanied him ten miles on his way, and, after that, the paneled wagon was lost in the wilderness and the West, and we all turned sorrowing home, and his words "no more" proved true. And the next wheeled wonder was a calash-topped chaise, heavy, squeaky on its two great loops of leather springs, and a swaying, sleepy way with it, that, for the occupants was as easy as lying, but for the horse as wearisome as Pilgrim Christian's knapsack of iniquity. CHAPTER II. THE CONCORD COACH. Fifty miles north of Utica, New York, as the crow flies, there is a village. What there was of it in the old days lay in the bottom of a bay of land bounded on the north, south, and west by wooded hills, with some stone-mason work in them older than the Vatican. But now the beautiful town rises like a spring-tide high up the green sides of the bay. Once in twenty-four hours over the south hill lurched a stage-coach. The tin horn was whipped out of its sheath by the driver, and a short, sharp, nasal twang rang out, rising sometimes in one long clear note, that warbled away in an acoustic ringlet, like its aristocratic cousin with a mouth like a brazen morning-glory—the bugle. Every thing in the little village was broad awake. Doors flew open, faces were framed in at the windows, children hung on the gates. Then the driver gathered up the ribbons of his four-in-hand, swung off from the coach-top his long-lashed whip with its silken cracker, flicked artistically the off leader's "nigh" ear, gave the wheelers a neighborly slap, and with jingle of chains and rattle of bolt, and a sea-going rock and swing, down the hill he thundered and through the main street, the horses' ears laid close to their heads like a running rabbit's, a great cloud of dust rolling up behind the leather "boot" the color of an elephant, the passengers looking out at the stage windows, until, with a jolt and one sharp summons of the horn, like the note of a vexed and exasperated bee, the craft brings-to at the Post-office, and the driver whirls the padlocked pouch out from under his mighty boots to the ground, and then exploding the tip-end of his twelve-foot lash like a pistol-shot, he makes a sweep and comes about with a rattling halt in front of the stage-house. The fat old landlord—fat and old when you were a boy, and alive yet—shuffles out in slippers, opens the coach-door, swings down the little iron ladder with two rounds, and the passengers make a landing. One of them may have been General Brady, the man who said, or so they say, when told he could not survive the illness that prostrated him, "Beat the drum, the knapsack's slung, and Hugh Brady is ready to march!" Or it may have been Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king, and yet with his head on, which is not after the historic manner of monarchs out of business, going to his wilderness possessions in the North Woods. Or it may have been Frederick Hassler, the Swiss, Chief of the United States Survey in the long ago, en route for Cape Vincent—the man who knew more and tougher mathematics than all of his successors together, and who could say more while the hostlers were changing horses than anybody else could say in sixty minutes. Meanwhile the spanking team, loosed from the coach, file off in a knowing way and a cloud of steam, meeting with a snort of recognition the relay that is filing out to take their places. The Concord Coach THE CONCORD COACH That yellow, mud-bespattered stage, with "E. Merriam, No. something," blazoned on the doors, was the one thing that linked the small village with the great world, brought tidings of wars, accidents and incidents, that had grown gray on the journey, and word from far-away friends whose graves might have waxed green while the letters they had written, and secured with a round red moon of a wafer, and sealed with a thumb or a thimble, were yet trampled beneath the driver's feet like grain on the threshing-floor. Think of that coach creeping like an insect, for sixpence a mile, and five miles to the hour, to and fro between East and West, the only established means of communication! Think of its nine passengers inside, knocked about like the unlucky ivories in a dice-box, between New York and Detroit, between Boston and Washington. They get in, all strangers; the ladies on the back seat, the man who is sea-sick, by one coach- window, the man that chews "the weed, it was the devil sowed the seed," at the other; somebody going to Congress, somebody going for goods, somebody going to be married. They are all packed in at last like sardines, with perhaps an urchin chucked into some crevice, to make all snug. There are ten sorts of feet, and two of a sort, dovetailed in a queer mosaic upon the coach-floor. The door closes with a bang, the driver fires a ringing shot or two from his whip-lash, and away they pitch and lurch. Think of them riding all day, all night, all day again, crushed hats and elbowed ribs, jumping up and bouncing down into each other's laps every little while with some plunge of the coach; butting at each other in a belligerent way, now and then, as if "Aries the ram" were the ruling sign for human kind; begging each other's pardon, laughing at each other's mishaps, strangers three hours ago, getting to know each other well and like each other heartily, and parting at last with a clasp of the hand and a sigh of regret. I think a fifty-mile battering in a stage-coach used to shake people out of the shell of their crustaceous proprieties, and make more lifelong friends than a voyage of five thousand miles by rail. The contemplation for a day or two of a woman's back-hair or a man's bumps of combativeness, is about as merry as a catacomb tea-party, and about as conducive to lively friendships. All of us who have arrived at years of discretion—had Methuselah?—have had a suspicion for some time that this is not the same world we were born into. Such a looking-over-the-shoulder as the writer has just indulged in brightens the dim suspicion into certainty. It is a grander world, with grander needs and agencies to match. The little iron wheels have trundled the big wooden wheels out of the way. The dear old Concord coaches of the past are driven to the confines of civilization. Jehu has swung himself down from his box, thrust the butt end of his whip-stock into the tin horn's mouth, hung them up on a nail behind the door, and died. The swallows flash in and out at the diamond lights in the old stage barn, its only occupants. I visited Fort Scott a while ago—Fort Scott, Kansas, that wonderful bit of metropolitan vigor in the wilderness. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad had reached it, and gone on to the Indian country. It had been a grand center for radiating stage lines, and the day the stages were to break up camp at Fort Scott and go deeper into Kansas, farther into Missouri, somebody, who had caught the sentiment of the thing, proposed that all the coaches should be grouped in one place, and a photographer should train his piece of small artillery upon them, and so they should be "taken." The picture is before me. The four-in-hands, the great coaches, the snug covered hacks for the cross cuts, the drivers in position, drivers and stages alike "all full inside," and a sprinkling of deck passengers. It was the work of an instant; the coaches were emptied and wheeled away, to be seen and heard and welcomed and looked after in Fort Scott no more. CHAPTER III. THE RAGING CANAL. The world has certainly grown. Putting the period just in time, the statement is a safe one—"has certainly grown." When De Witt Clinton developed the Dutch idea in America, and made a line of poetry from tide-water to Lake Erie, which people vilified and christened "Clinton's Ditch," the world was not quite ready for it, and the Governor went ahead in a canal-boat! Fancy that world distanced by a three-horse-power tandem team at six miles an hour to-day. But it was a stately affair then. There was a barrel of salt water standing at the bow of the packet-boat. There was the proud and portly Governor erect behind the barrel like Virgil's ears of attention—arrectis auribus. There were the horses rosetted and bespangled. There were the high and mighty dignitaries on deck, clustered like young bees on a hive's front door-step at swarming time. There were the enthusiastic crowds along the way. Arrived at Buffalo, amid surges of music and rattle of cannon, the Chief Executive poured that brackish Atlantic water into the fine indigo blue of Lake Erie. It was not quite so grand as the old ceremonial when the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic, but it meant a great deal more. It meant Bishop Berkely, who said something about a Westward-going star, of which some mention has been made once or twice. It meant Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, in that far future which is our instant present. It meant EMPIRE! You can count the acts that have meant more, within a hundred years, upon four fingers and a thumb—more than ladling out that barrel of sea-water in a strange place. Well, the boats began to slide along the thoroughfare of water, and go up stairs and down stairs in a strange way; and they multiplied like the sluggard's schoolma'am,—who was his aunt, also,—till there are boats in sight in summer days everywhere between Buffalo and tide-water; and they grow larger, till there are a thousand craft on the Erie Canal of greater tonnage than the vessel from whose deck Lawrence sent up the dying charge that made him as deathless as the Pleiades. The cargoes of those boats, when they began to creep, was something wonderful: men, women and children, plows, axes and Bibles; teachers, preachers and Ramage presses, along with bedsteads that corded up and creaked like gates in high winds; big wheels, little wheels and reels, looms with timber enough in them for saw-mills and a log or two left to begin upon. So you see, when they went West in those days they packed up their homes and took them along. You were sure of their finding anchor-ground somewhere, for how could a man go adrift with a wife, five children, a brass kettle and a feather-bed tied to him? You were sure, too, that the world would not be wronged out of a home— perhaps a better and a happier one than the man set afloat on Clinton's Ditch for a place nearer sundown. Thus it was that the grand westward drift of things received its first impulse. Churches with steeples to them, school- houses full of children, newspapers, farms, Christian homes, not one of which appeared on the bills of lading, were all tumbled aboard the canal-boat amidships or somewhere, though nobody seemed to know it. The mighty fleet of white- decked "liners," looking like Brobdignagian—that word won't hurt you if you don't go near it!—ants' eggs with windows in them, has had more to do with the march of civilization than all the aquatic armaments that ever thundered. Sometimes, scurrying along in the cars at thirty miles an hour, you catch glimpses of nests of these eggs adrift in the green fields, floating by the white villages, and advancing, by contrast, so wonderfully slow that they go backward. Now and then a chit of a girl, with a little market-basket of garden vegetables upside down on the top of her head, or a young fellow who parts his hair in the middle, and has nothing else to part with worth mentioning, catches a glimpse of the eggs, too, and tosses a sniff of contempt at them out of the window, never dreaming that he looks upon a letter or two of the alphabet of progress. I never see one of those boats without a sigh of regret, not because I want to be captain or cook or anything, but because I took my first foreign voyage on one of them, and the boat was a "liner" at that! We "took ship" at Oneida, took water along the way, took soundings when we ran aground, took steamer at Buffalo. It was a taking trip. Of the passengers, one turned into Doctor of Divinity, another into Professor of Latin in the University of Michigan, a third into President of a Southern College, a fourth into the pastor of a Michigan church, two bright and pleasant young ladies into dust long ago, and the seventh and youngest into the writer of this sketch. It was a merry, care-free party. Not one of the survivors can say that for himself to-day. We were clustered in the little forward cabin. We ran over the deck to the after-cabin for meals. We sat upon our baggage, and took something more than a bird's-eye view of the country. We told stories and sang songs and dreamed dreams. We went into cool locks where the water splashed and tumbled about the bows, and were glad. We suffocated ourselves with blankets when we crossed the Montezuma mosquitoes. Why not? Verily, there is but one Marsh there, but of mosquitoes there are several. I have heard of Montezuma's death. It was some time ago, but it would have been no wonder had he died young, not because of the love of the Gods, but of the mosquitoes. We sat on the deck and watched the steersman's intonations. When he cried, "Low bridge!" we merely ducked our heads; but when he said, "Low bridge!" down we went flat upon the floor like a parcel of undiscovered idolaters. The Palinurus slued the stern of the boat around, and we leaped off upon the "heel-path" and took a stroll. He drove bows on upon the opposite shore, and we took a walk on the "tow-path" with the "drive," who looked like a bundle of old clothes, was as smart as a whip, and profane as "our army in Flanders." He sang songs through the night and the rain as happy as a frog, and when, covered with mud and water, he came aboard to eat, he looked like a bewildered muskrat, and his tracks like a muskrat's also. We used to hear one genuine word of old English in those seafaring days. Perhaps some other ambitious "liner" was pulling out ahead of us. You confer with the "drive" as to the chance of passing it. You offer him a shilling to try, and his under jaw drops like the lower half of a bellows. But promise him a "scale"—scale, skilling, shilling—and he gets all the tough pull out of his tandem that there is in it, and goes by if he can. Websterian "probabilities" says that is not the derivation of "scale" at all, but no matter. So you see, we went to sea without leaving shore. Now and then a cigar- shaped packet, fuller of windows on the sides than ever a German flute was of finger-holes, would pass us with a swash and the blast of a bugle to "open lock," and the three horses at a swinging trot, the deck crowded with passengers, and the cook in the kitchen stewing and frying and roasting himself and the dinner in the same kettles. It was the aristocrat of canal craft, the packet was, the captain was somebody, and wore gloves, and when on my voyage I saw one coming, I went down into the cabin, red as to my ears, for something I had forgotten, and that I never found in time to come out of the egg till the packet had gone by. It has since occurred to me that possibly the redness of ears at that time might not have been a quality so remarkable as their length. How you would like the snuggery of the cabin now, and the shelf of a berth that you couldn't turn over in if a heavy fellow happened to be sagging on the shelf above you, and the canal-banks even with the top of your head when you sit down, and the sun about as hot upon the roof as if he had actually taken a deck passage and come bodily aboard, is not a matter of doubt. But the memory of that voyage is pleasant, after all—after all what? all these years; like the music of Caryl, "pleasant but mournful to the soul." And should this short story of a long voyage bring back to any reader some such journey that he took in the years that are gone, some cheerful hours he spent, some cherished friends he made, some faces he learned to love, that for him shall never be changed nor sent away, then these paragraphs are not vain. CHAPTER IV. THE IRON AGE. They tarried longer by the way in those days, and they lived longer, most of them. I think, too, they knew each other better, possibly loved each other more, when they went six miles an hour, than we know each other now that we go sixty. Mind, I would have nobody turn into muriate of soda and make a Lot's wife of himself on my account, but then a harness with neither hold-back nor breeching is a dangerous thing unless the world is a dead level, than which nothing is so very dead, not even a graveyard. The world has certainly grown. These sketches are written at a place in the State of New York known on the old maps as Chadwick's Bay. It is flanked by one of the loveliest villages in all the empire. To that village came the late Rev. Dr. Elisha Tucker, whose memory is yet fragrant in the churches—then neither Reverend nor Doctor, but the plain and primitive Elder Tucker—came with his young wife, who went a thousand miles alone, a while ago, to visit friends!—came from Buffalo forty miles along the Lake shore to that lovely village in a one- horse wagon, and took up his life work. There was not a Baptist church west of him. He preached the first sermon anybody ever heard in Cleveland. A schooner with rusty sails came sliding into Chadwick's Bay with his small store of household wealth. The painted Senecas and the smoky Onondagas went gliding about like vanishing shadows. Deer trooped across the landscapes like flocks of sheep. Speckled trout—nature's great piscatorial triumph, if they didn't weigh but a pound apiece—spotted with carmine and gold, leaped out of the cold brooks into the sunshine. There is a roll of dull thunder day and night within ear-shot of where I write these lines at Chadwick's Bay. Twenty-five hundred cars rumble by every twenty-four hours. Flocks and herds from a thousand hills and plains roll along on iron casters like pieces of heavy cabinet-work. Broad harvests trundle Eastward to tide-water. They rattle over the lines of longitude, and set them together in their flight like the stripes on the American flag. It is the World on Wheels. The story of the Locomotive is the history of mechanical invention. It is, if you please, the monogram of the right-hand cunning of mankind. In its finished state, standing upon the track as it does to-day, in its burnished bravery of steel and brass, its shining arms thrust into the caskets slung lightly at its sides, ready at an instant's notice to pluck out great handfuls of power and toss them in fleecy volumes along the way—I want Job to take a look and tell us all about it. He that so described a horse of flesh and blood that Landseer could have painted the creature if he had never seen one, must be able to handle the Locomotive without gloves. Job would have been the man for the job. Did you ever tell anybody that the Locomotive is a familiar acquaintance of yours—that you are on speaking terms with it? If you never did, then never do, for it will strain your listener's credulity and your credibility fearfully. I have a sort of touch-the-brim-of-the-hat respect for the thing, and am never so busy that I cannot give it a civil look as it goes by. The dull prose strikes into a quickstep as I think about it: Would ye know the grand Song that shall sing out the age— That shall flow down the world as the lines down the page— That shall break through the zones like a North and South river, From winter to spring making music forever? I heard its first tones by an old-fashioned hearth, 'Twas an anthem's faint cry on the brink of its birth! 'Twas the tea-kettle's drowsy and droning refrain, As it sang through its nose as it swung from the crane. Twas a being begun and awaiting its brains— To be saddled and bridled and given the reins. Now its lungs are of steel and its breathings of fire, And it craunches the miles with an iron desire, Its white cloud of a mane like a banner unfurled, It howls through the hills and it pants round the world! It furrows the forest and lashes the flood, And hovers the miles like a partridge's brood. Oh! stand ye to-day in the door of the heart, With its nerve raveled out floating free on the air, And feeling its way with ethereal art By the flash of the Telegraph everywhere, And then think, if you can, of a mission more grand Than a mission to LIVE in this time and this land; Round the World for a sweetheart an arm you can wind, And your lips to the ear of listening Mankind! There used to be a question and answer in the old manuals of Chemistry that shut together like a pair of scissors: "What are the precious metals? Gold and silver." How will it do to amend and let the mouthful of catechism run thus: "What are the precious metals? Iron and brass." Iron for wheels, and brass for people! That is better because it is truer. Whoever is curious to know how the name of a certain alloy of copper and zinc came to take in a mental and moral quality as a third ingredient, need only post himself a little in insular literature. The rich ore of the copper mines of Cyprus was called Cyprian brass. Venus was the chief divinity of the Cyprian people's adoration. Queerly enough, their quality struck into their mines like a thunderbolt, and the name of the hard, glittering, resounding metal came to have a meaning that could not possibly pertain to a well-behaved pair of brass and irons. Brass in the face is a good thing in a wrong place, but besides making a capital bearing for a rail-car axle, a little in a man's purposes, as the world goes, is not so very bad an alloy after all. It may make them last longer, if nothing more. CHAPTER V. THE IRON HORSE. The world had to wait a weary time for its wheels, simply because the successors of Tubal and Jubal took something for granted. It is never safe, as every day's experience proves, to take anything or anybody for granted. The only safety in praising the average man is to hold on to your eulogy till he is dead, and done doing altogether. What the cunning artificers took for granted was this: an engine's pulling power is equal to its own weight. And so they made wheels with teeth, and rails with cogs, to help the thing along. They rigged an anomalous, pre-Adamite fowl's foot with a corrugated sole, on each side of the engine. These feet were set down one after the other upon the roughened rail, and pushed the awkward affair in a sort of dromedary way, monstrous to contemplate and tedious to wait for. Device followed device, all as vain as the achievement of perpetual motion, until some man, after a Columbus fashion when he played with a hen's egg, said: Is this true that we have all been taking for granted? Will not an engine pull more than its own weight? Let us try it. They did, and it did. It trailed long streets and great towns of cars—which were warehouses and dwellings and palatial mansions; which were sheep-folds and cattle-yards and coal mines—after it at twenty, forty, fifty miles an hour, as if real estate belonged to the ornithological kingdom, and had taken perpetual flight like Logan's cuckoo. When you see a brace of iron bars laid parallel upon the ground, and a harp of wire strung along beside it, you see the fragment of a man that can never indulge in a soul without borrowing one. It is the line of a mighty muscle, and the thread of a fine nerve. On the one, thoughts fly—thoughts that are "up and dressed" in their verbal clothes. On the other, things. The one is seven-ninths of a Scriptural aspiration five-ninths realized: "O that I had the wings of a dove, that I might fly away—and be at rest." The other is the consolidated arm of Christendom, the common carrier of the movable world. But grand as it is, and priceless as are the treasures it is bearing, it was too late for the holiest burden of all time. There was no train to Jerusalem, and the Lord of Life rode into the city in the humblest guise, upon a donkey. At Omaha, one day, I saw a steam caravan come in from what used to be a "forty years in the wilderness" region, direct from the Golden Gate. It was the tea-train from the Celestial Kingdom. It was nothing to look at—the dingy, battered cars, the engineer as if he had been wrestling with a coal-heaver—but it was much to think of. That cargo came right out of the West, straight from the "Drowsy East." The bars of the trans-continental railroad had careened the horizon with their mighty leverage, and let the cargo through—the very cargo for which they waited in the old days with their faces toward the rising sun, like a praying Israelite. The locomotive had wheeled the rolling globe a half revolution, brought the tide of commerce to the right-about, like a soldier upon his heel. It has proved to be anything but what it was suspected of being—the locomotive has—for, made to be a common carrier, a gigantic, quicktime dray-horse, it is a civilizer, a builder of cities; and if the three W's, Messrs. Wesley Brothers and Whitefield, will forgive me, a sort of —Methodist; in fact, an outright circuit-rider, and a missionary, withal! The preachers of flesh and blood denounced the seraglio and the harems of the American Desert, but nobody minded it. The law-makers frowned upon them, and they grew like a garden of cucumbers; were about as far beyond their jurisdiction as the household economy of "the man in the moon." The locomotive made for them at last, from Atlantic and Pacific; it brought the Gentiles and the "Saints" shoulder to shoulder; its mountain-eagle elocution rang through the valleys of Utah, and sooner or later it will whistle that barbarism of the Orient down the wind. The locomotive is a civilizer. It happened to the writer to witness the splendid display of the Missouri State Fair at Kansas City, that young Chicago of the red Missouri. Altogether it was the most admirable display of agricultural products ever seen in the Far West. Than the artistic grouping of apples in vast variety, nothing finer was ever witnessed. They were literally "apples of gold in pictures of silver." Without spot or blemish, better than ever grew in the Garden of Eden, they were all from the orchards of the wilderness. But the most interesting and suggestive department, as having direct reference to the civilizing agency of the locomotive, was one surmounted with the legend, "The Great American Desert." Not a thing in it that did not come from the once sterile plain or inaccessible mountain region; that was not grown in the very realm set down upon maps hardly twenty years old as a pathless and arid waste; and not a figure pictured in it, but a bewildered buffalo or a mounted savage; that was not made possible by the magic touch of railroad iron. What a maker of new and improved maps is the locomotive! That department was worthy to be the coat-of-arms of the Angel of Abundance. Above all, were the antlers of the elk, like the branches of a blasted tree; and the shaggy head of a buffalo, curly as the head of the heathen god of wine. Then there were stalks of corn that would amaze you, and as full of ears as Mr. Spurgeon's audiences. There were squashes and melons and pumpkin-pies in "the original package," in whose case the usual law of limitation had been suspended, and they had grown on without let or hindrance. Wheat that Illinois would have been proud of. Minerals of wonderful richness and beauty. Grapes in clusters of ideal symmetry and size. Apples as of a fresh and new creation that no blighting bug or worm had yet found out. Indeed, think of anything you like best that grows in a garden, and it was there, all from the Great American Desert. There was an address to the assembled thousands, but nothing so eloquent as this upon the power of the locomotive as a cultivator and civilizer. But for it, the products would never have been here in Kansas City, nor the producers there in the wilderness. Take the Illinois Central Railway; it was to that splendid State what the rod of Moses was to the rock in the wilderness. It smote it into life and luxuriance. Down from Chicago to Cairo, just as many miles as there are days in a year, down from Dunleith to that same capital of modern Egypt, four hundred and fifty-six miles, it went,—in its time the stateliest railway enterprise in the world. Had you been a passenger on a southward-bound train of that road, say sixteen years ago, you would have traversed a region of magnificent possibilities. True, the locomotive would have hurried you through unfenced corn-fields nine miles long, whose rows swung round as the cars flew on, like vast brigades on drill, but you would have struck out, at last, upon the untilled and almost untrodden pastures of God. You could never forget it. The month was September. The train had reached the center of a grand prairie. The few passengers debarked, and the train ran on a half mile and left us alone. Around on every side, the prairie curved up to the edge of the sky. It was a mighty bowl, and we, served up in the bottom of it, a very diminutive bill of fare for such a tremendous dish. The gaudy yellow and red Fall flowers ornamented the bowl like some quaint pattern for Chinese ware. Not a tree nor a living thing in sight; not a sign that man had ever been an occupant of the planet, but something that looked like a cigar-box high up the side of the bowl, and was, in fact, a human habitation. The great blue sky was set down exactly upon the edge of the dish, like the cover of a tureen, and there we were, pitifully belittled. The feeling was oppressive. We had nothing small or mean with which to compare ourselves and be somebody again, and were glad to have the train back once more, that we might clamber in and be safe out of the vastness. On we went till the pleasant little village of Anna was reached. The country was full of peaches. They ripened and fell beside the roads. The swine were fattened upon them. The people had just begun to learn that peaches were money in disguise. The railroad had just taught them this lesson of finance. It had made Chicago, and Union County peaches possible combinations. But they were only beginners, and when you asked a man perched upon a wagon-load of Sunnysides the price, he said, "How many, stranger?" and when you replied, "A couple of dozen," the answer came back like the shutting of a jack-knife blade, "Take 'em along an' welcome!" The locomotive whistled us to quarters, and by-and-by the speed slackened to eight miles an hour. The windows were garnished with heads in a twinkling. There was a deer on the track, and bound south, like ourselves. The engineer crowded him a little, and throwing back his head, away he went over ties and culverts and little bridges, the cow-catcher turned into a deer-catcher for the moment. Again the engineer would let up a little to give the fellow a chance, and so for miles, till at last, as if he had wings to his heels, he bolted the track, bounded over a little knoll and was gone. Now, find that big bowl of ours if you can! Farms checker the prairie. Villages dot the broad landscape like flocks of sheep. Cities with mayors to them have sprung up. The locomotive brought the builders, brought the buildings. In a word, the motive was the locomotive. Take the Chicago & Northwestern Railway across the States of Illinois and Iowa, across the Rock and the Mississippi to the banks of the Missouri, four hundred and eighty-eight miles to Council Bluffs. Seven years ago its western terminus was New Jefferson, Iowa. There you took private conveyance for a journey of one hundred and eighty miles to the Missouri. You launched out over the great swells of prairie, rising and falling, rising and falling, till you almost caught yourself listening for the wash of the heavy sea. Little hamlets at long intervals showed like unnamed islets. The wolf looked after you as you passed. The hawks sat in rows on the telegraph wire over which, that minute, a message was flashing to California, the little hawks all facing us with their aquiline countenances, like so many young Romans. The tall prairie grass waved desolately in the wind. The prairie poultry disputed the right of way with the advancing horses. The quick tick of the locusts, all winding their watches at once, sounded loud and clear in the silence. Dismantled stage barns roofed with prairie hay were sparsely sprinkled along the route. At last we struck out upon a thirty-mile stretch without a human habitation. The clouds and the sun played tricks with the landscape. Now you thought you saw a field of red wheat ripe for the sickle, and now a scraggy old orchard dwarfed in the distance. The one was a family of little oaks, the other the long tawny grass of the prairie slopes. It was a virgin world. You had escaped from the clank of engines and the clamor of men. The air swept by without a taint of smoke or any human naughtiness. Your pulse played with an evener beat. You were not quite sure you ever wanted to get out of the wilderness at all. You meet now and then a "freighter," as the ox-expressmen of plain and prairie are called, with their noisy tongues and explosive whips, and their four, six, eight yokes of lumbering oxen trailing a yet more lumbering wagon. Then you come to Ida Grove, with a hospitable tavern in it. Then fifty miles down the Maple Valley, as unpeopled and peaceful as the Happy Valley of Rasselas. Seven years ago! And now it is farms and houses and villages all the way. Churches point their slender white fingers towards the sky. School-houses hum with the busy tongues of the disciples of "b, a, ba, k, e, r, ker, baker." Railway trains go scurrying along. The locomotive has brought the world to the wilderness, and took back for "return freight" the wilderness to the world. The old trick of the clouds and the sunshine has been played again. There are sweeps of ripened grain upon the slopes. There are orchards that are not oaks. CHAPTER VI. PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS. They have discovered that our next-door neighbor, the moon, is about the temperature of boiling water. What a splendid locomotive was spoiled just to make a moon! Those of us who are forty years old have been spending the last twenty in unlearning much they had persuaded us to believe in the first ten. No Great African Desert. No Great American Desert. No giants in Patagonia, except little ones. No William Tell, no apple, no target practice. "G. Washington" never had a hatchet. No Maelstrom off the Norwegian coast. No White Nile mystery. Homer never wrote Homer, nor Ossian Ossian. There are two things, two blessed doubts, that we know as little about as we ever did, to- wit: Who wrote the Letters of Junius? and Is there an open Polar Sea? I sincerely hope they will never find out. The locomotive is aggressive. It assaults and captures and tames the wilderness. You are a passenger on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway, that can swing you down through Missouri and the Indian Territory and Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. You embark at Sedalia, the most vigorous inland town in Missouri except Kansas City. The cars are as elegant as any in America, the track smooth to a wonder, and altogether the perfection of locomotive civilization. Away you glide. Fort Scott is passed, and the train begins to show queer characteristics. The men that get aboard are leaner and longer, with a swinging stride like so many panthers. They carry brown rifles, they are girt about with a small armament of revolvers. They are in full blossom as to the brims of their hats, like sunflowers. They talk deer, horse, bear, turkey. They brevet you, and you become captain or colonel by the breath of their mouths, which is tobacco. There are sleepy-looking dogs in the baggage-car, with ears like little leather aprons. You see more flat women in sunbonnets than you ever saw before in one place. Three or four exaggerated creatures lie in a heap in a corner. They are the half-way station between a large rabbit and a small donkey. They are ears with bodies to them. It is your first sight of a buck-rabbit. You hear border talk and see border manners, in cars finished to the last touch of pier-glass polish. You look up, and lo, a Cherokee at your elbow! There he stands, as if a fresh creation, and positively his first appearance anywhere. His eyes, like black beads suddenly struck with intelligence, had taken you all in before you saw him at all. You begin to realize where you are—that old Fort Holmes is at your right and Little Rock at your left; that you are in a country with such places in it as Elk City, Panther, Yellville, Crockett and Waxahatchie. Again, you are on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway. You land at Emporia, Kansas, one hundred and twenty-eight miles from Kansas City. The locomotive breasts the prairie in panoply as glittering as anywhere. You find a brisk and busy town, well-filled stores, elegant houses, capital schools, a public library, and intelligent and hospitable people. The railroad was Pharaoh's daughter to it. It found the little Moses in the bulrushes, and made Emporia a marvel in the wilderness. You see last week's New York fashions in the streets, the latest works of literature upon the tables. The pretty dining-room girl startles your left ear at breakfast with, "Buffalo-steak or antelope?" You regard her in a dazed way, and ask "What?" "Buffalo-steak or antelope?" and you say "Both!" A citizen, on hospitable thoughts intent, promises to take you out antelope-hunting. You faintly enquire "Where?" and the reply is, "O, ten or a dozen miles!" You begin to understand things, and to see that the locomotive is trailing civilization along after it wherever it goes. Again on the train: A man enters the car who toes straight out the way he is going. He has a red sash, silk, and Chinese at that, about his waist. The glitter of a silver-mounted revolver at his left side, a shady sombrero upon his head, an uncivilized nugget of gold for a breastpin, a small log-chain of the same material a-swing upon his breast, buttons up and down the side seams of his pantaloons, square-shouldered, broader at the breast than equatorially. There you have him, and isn't he cool? He gives you a square look with both eyes. He seats himself upon the crimson cushions as indifferently as if he had never seen anything else. It is an American turned into a Mexican herder, arrayed in his holiday clothes, and bound for St. Louis. He is at home on horseback, is at home anywhere, and can throw a lariat like a savage. He takes an apple out of one pocket, a desperate-looking knife out of another; a little jerk of the wrist, and about eight inches of steel blade flash out, he looks at you a second, and—carves his apple! Then that cutlery becomes a toothpick of the Arkansas patent. He will tell you it is a frog-sticker. I should like to see the railroad-hog, a variety in the animal kingdom of which there is something to be said by-and-by, get his seat while he is in the baggage-car taking a smoke. If carved ox is beef, and manufactured calf is veal, that hog would be in danger of turning into pork. Though the herder is quiet, civil, self-reliant, yet he is a peripatetic Bill of Rights. He is his own Legislature, and the first law is self-defence. He answers your questions in a quaint, sententious way. He will tell you that a great herd of those Southwestern cattle look like a drove of horns with legs and tails to them; that they all think a man has four feet, and is half horse. They seldom see him except mounted, and when they do, that man must make "a right smart" use of the two feet he has left, to escape being gored and trampled to death. Those illogical cattle have no idea of the concrete. The herder loves the free life, the swift motion, the abundant air, and the elbow- room of the plains. He has not taken as much medicine as you can put on a knife-blade in eight years. When he is "under the weather," he just curls down somewhere, and sleeps it off like a dog. Yonder are a couple of rough men, with Northeasterly voices, and shaggy about the head as a couple of buffaloes. They have just come in from killing two hundred of those "cattle upon a thousand hills." They think they are hunters. They are unacquainted with Webster, and miss the right word, for they are unlicensed butchers, and ought to be punished. They had slain the two hundred for their tongues alone, and left the great carcasses a reckless waste upon the plains. If those fellows could only have an Egyptian "lean year" all to themselves, I should like to put them on a strictly vegetable diet, and turn them out to graze with Nebuchadnezzar. Such touches of border-life give a Far Western train a character of its own that is by no means unpleasant. You feel something as you did when you entered the National Conservatory at Washington, breathed the scented air of the home-made tropic and saw the great-leafed palms, and waited a minute for an elephant to come out. But let nobody think that the world on wheels in Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and the Plains essentially differs from the same world trundling about in New England. Equal courtesy, heartier cordiality, just as much intelligence as characterize the route from New York to Boston. Writing of Boston: A certain publishing house in that city once sent a letter to a Chicago citizen, and a man to bring it, asking for a list of those places in the West where the people would be "up to their publications," for that is the way they put it. The Chicago citizen referred them to a great fat Gazetteer, and the inquisition ended.