HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN.
A locomotive has two habits. It drinks and it smokes. It seems to take
comfort in drinking at a liberal river, rather than where the draught
is trickled out to it through a stingy pipe on a dry prairie. Climbing
heavy grades involves hard drinking. On the Mount Washington Railway,
where you travel a mile and rise nineteen hundred feet in an hour and
half, the thirsty engine disposes of eighteen hundred gallons of
water--all dissipated in breath.
During the late war they often watered engines from pails, as they
would ponies. Perhaps you have sat upon a bank, not of thyme but of
time, at midnight, in Tennessee, with suspicious cedars all about
within _hailing_ distance--trees that often shed queer fruit in a
vigorous way--waiting for the train-men to bring locomotive
refreshments of light wood and pails of water. Never since then has the
smoke of an engine been welcome, but often, in those times when the
nights were "unruly," would the burning red cedar load the air with a
suspicion of sweet incense that was really grateful. Possibly it was
associated with the perfume of the cedar bows of boyhood, when the
flight of one's own arrow, sped from the springing wood, was grander
than any flight of eloquence the archer has heard since. To-day, a
whiff of cedar will carry you faster and farther than a swift engine.
It will take almost any half-century-old boy back to the era of
blue-striped trousers and roundabouts, and girls with white pantalettes
gathered at the bottom; to the time when bow and arrow, windmill and
kite, jack-knife, fishhooks and tops, "two old cat," Saturday
afternoons and training-days were so many letters in the alphabet of
happiness, and he will not be a bit worse for the trip, but younger,
gentler and more human.
Writing of boys: till the writer was sixteen years old he never saw a
deacon, that he couldn't tell him as quick as he could a squirrel.
Sometimes they were tall and thin, but often stout, and as the papers
have it, "_prominent_ members of society"--measured from the second
vest button to the small of the back! But they were always gray, and
sometimes venerable. He used to wonder if they were born old, and the
idea of a _young_ deacon was impossible. The locomotive has hurried up
these useful servants of the church, so that they are sometimes picked
before they are quite ripe, and sent forward by an early train. Take a
sleek, dark-haired, flare-vested, civet-scented, slim-waisted man in a
cut-away, and switching his patent-leathers with a ratan, and you have
a deacon that would puzzle Wilderness John, as Agassiz never was
puzzled by a new specimen of natural history. But he may be a capital
deacon for all that, only in disguise.
The more you travel, the less you carry. The novice begins with two
trunks, a valise, a hat-box and an umbrella. He jingles with checks. He
haunts the baggage-car like a "perturbed spirit." He ends with a small
knapsack, an overcoat and a linen duster. Bosom, collar, wristbands, he
does himself up in paper like a curl. He is as clean round the edges as
the margins of a new book.
We throw away a great deal of baggage on the life journey that we
cannot well spare; a young heart, bright recollections of childhood,
friends of the years that are gone. And so we "fly light," but we do
not fly well.
Let us approach the baggage-man with tenderness. Let us tender him
a quarter, if he in turn will give quarter to our trunk. He is
square-built and broad-shouldered. His vigorous exercise in throwing
things has developed his muscles till he projects like a catapult. It
is pleasant to watch his playful ways, provided you carry your baggage
in your hat. He waltzes out a great trunk on its corners till they are
as dog-eared as a school reader. He keeps carpet-bags in the air like a
juggler. While one is going up another is coming down. Hinges of trunks
give way. There is a smell of camphor and paregoric, and a jingle of
glass, and a display of woman's apparel. They are all bundled up like
an armful of fodder, and thrust back into the offending trunk, and a
big word is tumbled in after them--to keep things down.
[Illustration: THE BAGGAGE SMASHER.]
Meanwhile, the tremendous voice of the check-master tolls like a bell,
"4689 Cleveland! 271 Rochester!" and the baggage-car is as lively with
all sorts of baggage as corn in a corn-popper. Things that are marked,
"this side up with care!" come down bottom-side up, like captured
mud-turtles. They go end over end, like acrobats. A rope is stretched
around the place of destruction, to keep the crowd that is watching the
entertainment from being killed. This has always seemed to me a very
touching instance of the loving kindness of railway officials, and yet
it is possible a spare end of that same rope might be used in a
pleasant way to diversify the performances about that baggage-car. They
have--I hope he is yet alive--a model baggage-man on the Chicago,
Burlington & Quincy Railroad. He is very feeble. Once he was the
champion ground-tumbler of the West, but now he has the galloping
consumption. He is a melancholy spectacle, but he is a model of his
kind. The baggage moves quietly about him, and yet the transfer is made
rapidly and on time. There is only one thing that prevents his
promotion--his being made inspector of baggage-men throughout the
country, with a commission to travel and visit them all. It is this:
quick consumption is not contagious. Not one of his subordinates could
possibly catch it.
Sometimes a train in an accountable way has a characteristic. Were you
ever passenger on the Inarticulate Train? The conductor enters the car,
closes the door with a confused bang, and, his little tongs swinging on
a finger in an airy way, he shouts "Tix!" The train-boy coasts along
behind him, and he says, "Ap! Pape! Norangz!" The brakeman pops his
head in at the door, shows you the top of his cap, and roars down into
his manly bosom, "Tledr!" just as you are pulling into that misplaced
Castilian city, in the region where, according to the old song,
"Potatoes they grow small in Maumee!"
The very wheels beneath you trundle along in an indistinct fashion, and
the engine has a wheeze instead of a whistle. It is as if the railway
dictionary had been run over by the cars a number of times, and there
was nothing left for the owners but to serve out the fragments to
passengers. The brakeman of a train holds, all things considered, the
post of honor, because the post of danger. The locomotive talks to him
all day, and, as a rule, that is about the only individual with whom he
holds much conversation. It says "Hold her!" and round goes the wheel.
"Danger!" and he springs to it with a will. "Ease her!" and off comes
the brake with a clank. "Now I'm going to start!" "Now I'm going to
back!" "Off the track! Off the track!" "Coming to bridge!" "I see the
town!" "Open the s-w-i-t-c-h!" and, through all, the brakeman stands by
like a helmsman in a storm. On lightning trains he is not given to much
humor, but the article is in him. As you cross Iowa by the Chicago and
Northwestern Railway, and approach the great Divide, the stations run:
East Side--Tip-Top--West Side. The route through that region is a
little monotonous. It is the hammer, hammer, hammer of the wheels in
anvil cadence hour after hour. Between cat-naps, small enough to be
kittens, you see the great swells of prairie, and then more prairie.
But there is a brakeman on one of the trains that can enliven you a
little, and always brings up a smile like a glimmer of sunshine. He
says "East Side!" or "West Side!" stupidly enough, but when the train
is just halting at the pinnacle, he throws a hearty elation and a
double circumflex into his tone, much as if you had asked him what sort
of time he had at the great Railroad Ball, and he cries "TIP-TOP!"
That inflection of his always tells.
There is a poor joke, past the grace of saltpetre, that an economical
conductor will save a few hundred dollars a year more than his salary;
and there is an impression abroad in many minds that conductors take to
stealing as Dogberry got his reading and writing--naturally. When it
comes to that, a couple of railway directors and a president or two
have been known to steal more money than all the conductors in the
United States together _ever_ misappropriated. A conductor, if
dishonest, is not a rogue because he is a conductor, or a conductor
because he is a rogue. As a class, conductors are as honorable as
lawyers, physicians, bankers, while they run far greater risks, and
have far more to try their patience, than the money-changers and
professional gentlemen just named. Go from Providence to the Golden
Gate, and, as a rule, it is the conductors who treat you with the most
courtesy and kindness, step aside from the line of their official duty
to gratify your reasonable wishes and render you comfortable. And not
for you only, but for the hundreds of thousands of strangers who ride
upon their trains.
To them, generations of men and women only live from eighteen to
twenty-four hours. They pass on, and are seen no more. But during those
hours the conductor has human nature under a microscope. He discovers
things about people that they themselves had only guessed at. He
discerns traits that their neighbors never detected. The average
conductor is a shrewd man. He reads faces like a book, and remembers
them always.