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Transcriber's note:
Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).
Text enclosed by tilde characters is in bold face (~bold~).
[Illustration: THE GREEN TRAVELER,
[See page 62.]
THE WORLD ON WHEELS AND OTHER SKETCHES
bY
BENJ. F. TAYLOR
Chicago,
S. C. Griggs & Co.
1874
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
S. C. Griggs & Co.,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.
Printed at the Lakeside Press,
Clark and Adams Sts.,
Chicago.
ONLY THIS:
The Wheels in this book ran, during the summer of 1873, through the
columns of THE NEW YORK EXAMINER AND CHRONICLE, to "the head and front
of whose offending," the
REV. EDWARD BRIGHT, D.D.,
who gave those wheels "the right of way," the old rolling stock and a
miscellaneous cargo is
CORDIALLY CONSIGNED.
ROLLING STOCK AND BILL OF LADING.
_THE WORLD ON WHEELS._
CHAPTER. PAGE.
I. THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT 13
II. THE CONCORD COACH 17
III. THE RAGING CANAL 23
IV. THE IRON AGE 30
V. THE IRON HORSE 35
VI. PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS 45
VII. VICIOUS ANIMALS 51
VIII. HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN-MEN 60
IX. IN THE SADDLE 68
X. RACING AND PLOWING 74
XI. SNOW BOUND 82
XII. SCALDED TO DEATH 89
XIII. ALL ABOARD! 94
XIV. EARLY AND LATE 103
XV. DEAD HEADS 112
XVI. WORKING "BY THE DAY" 118
XVII. A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER 123
XVIII. DREAMING ON THE CARS 128
XIX. "MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT" 136
XX. THE MAKER OF CITIES 144
XXI. A CABOOSE RIDE 150
XXII. HATCHING OUT A WOMAN 154
XXIII. A FLANK MOVEMENT 159
XXIV. LIGHT AND SHADE 162
XXV. PRECIOUS CARGOES 168
_BAGGAGE._
I. MY STARRY DAYS 175
II. "NO. 104,163" 193
III. OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER 206
IV. OUT-DOOR PREACHING 216
V. THE STORY OF THE BELL 223
VI. "MY EYE!" 226
VII. THE OLD ROAD 241
VIII. A BIRD HEAVEN 251
ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE GREEN TRAVELER _Frontispiece._
THE CONCORD COACH 19
THE BAGGAGE SMASHER 63
A LITTLE LATE 110
BAGGAGE 173
SWITCH OFF 258
THE WORLD ON WHEELS.
CHAPTER I.
THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT.
The perpetual lever called a wheel is the masterpiece of mechanical
skill. At home on sea and land, like the feet of the Proclaiming Angel,
it finds a fulcrum wherever it happens to be. It is the alphabet of
human ingenuity. You can spell out with the wheel and the lever--and
the latter is only a loose spoke of that same wheel--pretty much
everything in the Nineteenth Century but the Christian Religion and the
Declaration of Independence. Having thought about it a minute more, I
am inclined to except the exceptions, and say they translate the one
and transport the other.
Were you ever a boy? Never? Well, then, my girl, wasn't one of your
first ambitions a finger-ring? And there is your wheel, with a small
live axle in it! But whatever you are, did you ever know a boy worth
naming and owning who did not try to make a wheel out of a shingle, or
a board, or a scrap of tin? Maybe it was as eccentric as a comet's
orbit, and only _wabbled_ when it was meant to whirl, but it was the
genuine curvilinear aspiration for all that. Boys, young and old,
"take to" wheels as naturally as they take to sin. I am sorry for the
fellow that never rigged a water-wheel in the spring swell of the
meadow brook, or mounted a wind-mill on the barn gable, or drew a
wagon of his own make. My sympathies do not extend to his lack of a
velocipede, which is nothing if not a bewitched and besaddled
wheelbarrow.
In fact, it seems to be the tendency of everything to _be_ a wheel.
There's your tumbling dolphin, and there's your whirling world. The
conqueror whose hurry set on fire the axles of his chariot was no
novelty. Who knows that the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis,
lighting up the sky about the polar circles in the night-time, may not
be the flashes from the glowing axles of the planet? Who knows that
the ice and snow may not be piled up about the Arctic and Antarctic
just to keep the flaming gudgeons as cool as possible? Does Sir John
Franklin? Does _any_body?
Take an old man's memory. Only give it a touch, and it turns like a
wheel between his two childhoods, and 1810 comes round before you can
count the spokes, and 1874 hardly out of sight.
When they made narrow wooden hands with slender wrists, and called them
oars, and galleys swept the Eastern seas in a grave and stately way,
they did well. When they fashioned broad and ghastly palms of canvas
that laid hold upon the empty air, and named them sails, they did
better. When they grouped around an axle the iron hands that buffeted
the waves and put the sea, discomfited, rebuked, behind the flying
ship, they had their wheel, and they did best!
A one-horse wagon--for nothing was buggy then, but neglected
bedsteads--artistically bilious, and striped like a beetle, with a
paneled box high before and behind, like an inverted _chapeau_,
and a seat with a baluster back, softened and graced with a buffalo
robe, warm in winter--and in summer also--was one of the wheeled
wonders of my boyhood. No sitting in that wagon like a right-angled
triangle--room in front for any possible length of leg, and a
foot-stove withal--room behind for two or three handfuls of children,
and a little hair-trunk with a bit of brass-nail alphabet on the cover.
Curiously enough, the wagon was owned by that noble Baptist pioneer of
the New York North Woods, Elder--not Reverend but revered--JOHN
BLODGETT, and in it he used to traverse "East road," and "West road,"
and "Number Three road," and go to Denmark and Copenhagen and Leyden
and Turin, and other places in foreign parts, without shipping a sea,
or, to borrow a morsel of thunder, without "seeing a ship." His was the
voice of "John crying in the wilderness"--John, the Beloved disciple,
he surely was.
Before he went to "the Ohio," for that is what they called it in the
years ago, he preached a farewell to the saddened friends, "Sorrowing
most of all that they should see his face no more," and then some
Christians, some children and some sinners accompanied him ten miles on
his way, and, after that, the paneled wagon was lost in the wilderness
and the West, and we all turned sorrowing home, and his words "no more"
proved true.
And the next wheeled wonder was a calash-topped chaise, heavy, squeaky
on its two great loops of leather springs, and a swaying, sleepy way
with it, that, for the occupants was as easy as lying, but for the
horse as wearisome as Pilgrim Christian's knapsack of iniquity.