Complaints are sometimes made of the want of due respect paid on the part
of porters to passengers’ luggage. It appears that occasionally a like
lack of caution is manifested by owners to their own property. It is
said that on a train lately on a western railway in America, some
passengers were discussing the carriage of explosives. One man contended
that it was impossible to prevent or detect this; if people were not
allowed to ship nitro-glycerine or dynamite legitimately, they’d smuggle
it through their baggage. This assertion was contradicted emphatically,
and the passenger was laughed at, flouted, and ignominiously put to
scorn. Rising up in his wrath, he produced a capacious valise from under
the seat, and, slapping it emphatically on the cover, said, “Oh, you
think they don’t, eh? Don’t carry explosives in cars? What’s this?” and
he gave the valise a resounding thump, “Thar’s two hundred good dynamite
cartridges in that air valise; sixty pounds of deadly material; enough to
blow this yar train and the whole township from Cook County to
Chimborazo. Thar’s dynamite enough,” he continued; but he was without an
auditor, for the passengers had fled incontinently, and he could have sat
down upon twenty-two seats if he had wanted to. And the respectful way
in which the baggage men on the out-going trains in the evening handled
the trunks and valises was pleasant to see.
The neglect of carefulness appears, in one instance at least, to have
involved inconvenience to the offending official. “An unknown genius,”
says an American periodical, “the other day entrusted a trunk, with a
hive of bees in it, to the tender mercies of a Syracuse
‘baggage-smasher.’ The company will pay for the bees, and the doctor
thinks his patient will be round in a fortnight or so.”
—Williams’s _Our Iron Roads_.