IN THE SADDLE.
The engineer and the brakeman are as often and as truly heroes as the
average veteran army colonel under fire for the tenth time. True
courage, thoughtful kindness, presence of mind, and a quiet bearing,
form a four-stranded quality that is never quite perfect if unraveled.
How have they all been illustrated! Take the hero of New-Hamburg, on
the Hudson River Road, who looked death in the face, and never left the
saddle. Take the dying engineer immortalized by the poet of Amesbury,
who used the last of his ebbing breath to make sure the coming train
was signalled. Take incidents chinked into the papers every day in
little type, that, pertaining to men without shoulder-straps or title,
are read with a passing glance, and then forgotten.
The locomotive engineer is as quiet as a Quaker meeting. One driver of
a four-horse coach will make more noise than a dozen of him. There he
is with his hand upon the iron lever, and looks forth from his little
window. If he wants to say something confidentially to a street
crossing, there is the bell-tongue. If he wishes to throw a word or two
back to the brakeman, or make a short speech to a distant depot, there
is the whistle. He pats his engine, and calls it "she." Its name is
Whirling Cloud or Rolling Thunder or Vampire or Vanderbilt, but it is
"she" all the time. He knows her ways, and she understands his. He
loves to see her brazen trappings shine; to watch the play of her
polished arms; to let her out on a straight shoot; to make time.
Put your foot in the stirrup and swing yourself aboard. The engineers
little cabin is a regular houdah for an elephant. It is a princely way
of making a royal progress. The engineer bids you take that cushioned
seat by the right-hand window. You hear the gurgle of the engine's
feverish pulse, and the hiss of a whole community of tea-kettles. There
is his steam-clock with its finger on the figure. There is his
time-clock. One says, sixty pounds. The other, forty miles an hour. A
little bell on the wall before him strikes. That was the conductor. He
said "Pull out," and he pulls. The brazen bell, like a goblet wrong
side up, spills out a great clangor. The whistle gives two sharp, quick
notes. The driver swings back the lever. The engine's slender arms
begin to feel slowly in her cylindrical pockets for something they
never find, and never tire of feeling for. Great unwashed fleeces are
counted slowly out from the smoke-stack. The furnace doors open and
shut faster and faster. The faces of the clock dials shine in the
bursts of light like newly-washed school-children's that have been
polished off with a crash towel. The lever is swung a little farther
down. The search for things gets lively. Fleeces are getting plentier.
The coal goes into the furnace and out at the chimney like the beat of
a great black artery. There is a brisk breeze that makes your hair
stream like a comet's.
The locomotive is alive with reserved power. It has a sentient tremor
as it hugs the track, and hurls itself along sixty feet for every tick
of the clock--as if you should walk twenty paces while your heart beats
once! First you get the idea, and next the exhilaration, of power in
motion. It is better than "the Sillery soft and creamy," of Longfellow.
It is finer than sparkling Catawba. It has the touch of wings in it.
You watch the track, and you learn something. You had always supposed
the iron bars were laid in two parallel lines. But you see! It is a
long slender V, tapering to a point in the distance! But the engine
pries them apart as it plunges on, and makes a track of them. The
locomotive quickens your pulse, but it does more. It quickens
vegetation, and makes things light and frisky. See that little bush
squat to the ground, like a hare in her form. It grows before your
eyes. It is a big bush, a little tree, a full-grown maple, that gave
down the sap for the sugar-camp kettle in your grandfathers time. There
are a couple of portly hay-stacks, like two Dutch burghers of the
Knickerbocker days, growing fatter every minute, and waddling out of
the way to let the train go by.
Two miles ago, a strolling farm-house stood in the middle of the road,
staring stupidly down the track. It has just got over the fence into
the lot, behind some shrubs and flowers and pleasant trees, and looks,
as you fly by, as if it had never moved at all. Apparently, really,
always, there is magic in the Locomotive.
There is a picture of the first railroad train in the State of New
York. It was taken by a man with no hands. Their proverbial cunning had
slipped down into his toes. The faces of the passengers are portraits.
One of them is the venerable THURLOW WEED, of New York. The car is
strictly a coach. They call a sixty-soul car a coach now. It is a
vicious misuse, for a railway-car is as much like a coach as a
rope-walk is like a German flute. The vehicle is bodied like a coach,
backed like a coach, doored like a coach, and has a little railing
around the roof to keep the baggage from going overboard. And there is
baggage. It is not a carpet-bag, nor a valise, nor a Saratoga, but a
leather portmanteau, an Old World cloak-carrier. There may be a pair of
flapped saddle-bags under somebody's feet inside. Modern satchels were
not.
There are three seats, and Mr. Weed sits upon the middle one. Before
this coach is the engine. The cylinder is trained like a Washington
gun, at an angle of about thirty-three and a third degrees, and seems
to have gotten the range pretty accurately of the engineer's head. The
engineer has no house, no seat, but stands upon a platform much like a
man about to be hanged. A wine-cask, small at both ends and big in the
middle, is perched on end within easy reach, filled with oven-wood;
to-wit, wood split axe-helve size, such as our fathers were wont to
manufacture for heating the egg-shaped brick oven on baking days. With
this fuel he provokes the patient water to boiling point. No bell, no
whistle, no means of communicating with him, except the conductor
catches him by the coat-skirt.
The conductor is a "captain." He has more dignity than a modern railway
superintendent. They go ten miles an hour, and they do well. Being in
the picture business, I may as well say that the Harpers once presented
a picture of an old-time iron tea-kettle, with a crooked spout and a
jingling lid. I _saw_ it jingle, and that's direct testimony. From
the vexed spout rolled little volumes of steam. Below it was the
portrait of a great locomotive, all ready to run. The twain were
relatives, for the tea-kettle was the shriveled, far away, nasal
grandfather of the engine, and beneath it were the words, "IN THE
BEGINNING." That told the story, as far as the story had gone.
These bits of fine art are suggestive. They mean that we have made
wonderful progress in the art of being common carriers, and that
one-half the world must keep very busy in thinking things and doing
things worth transporting by the other half. It is an axiom that no
city can achieve permanent prosperity simply by an immense carrying
trade. How about the world?