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.