EARLY AND LATE.
Swift motion is the passion of the age. See a picture, see a statue,
see a poem, the question _is_, How long did it take to do it? The
press that does an old-fashioned month's work in thirty minutes; the
method by which the engraver's patient labor, with skill in every touch
of the burin, for a weary week, is counterfeited in fifteen minutes;
the sewing-machine that kills one woman and does the work of twenty
more, running up a seam like a squirrel up a limb; the railroad train
that can stitch two distant places the most closely together--such are
the things that kindle enthusiasm.
Did you ever see a man who had not ridden a mile a minute, or who did
not think he had? ("A mile a minute" is a bit of flippant talk, like
the man's who declared of a certain Fourth of July that he had seen a
hundred better celebrations.) I never did, except two. One of them had
never seen a locomotive, and the other conscientiously thought he went
a _lit-tle_ short of fifty-nine. A mile a minute has considerable
meaning. It implies a velocity of eighty-eight feet in a second. It
would keep a train ahead, or at least abreast, of a brisk gale, so that
there would be no wind at all. It wouldn't disturb your front hair, my
girl, if you stood on the rear platform, and played Lot's wife by
looking over your shoulder. It couldn't catch you--at least it couldn't
fan you--for it is a spanking gale that makes sixty miles an hour in
harness.
But everybody has gone a mile a minute by the cars. The writer has
tried to tell a number of people several times that _he_ had; that
between New-Buffalo and Michigan City, on the Michigan Central Road,
and one of the noblest and best-officered thoroughfares in the land,
he did go five miles in a minute apiece; and he went on explaining
that the track was straight as an arrow and smooth as glass, so that
his auditors might believe it and wonder over it, and they all, one
after another, rose and declared that they had gone a mile a minute,
and not one of them as few miles as a paltry five! Were you ever
standing on the deck of a sailing-craft, with a brisk breeze blowing,
when all at once it fell to a dead calm, or went about so that your
face was swashed with the wet canvas, and your hat knocked overboard?
The writer was that unfortunate navigator. So now he contents himself
with telling that, years ago, he rode on a train of the old Toledo &
Adrian Railway--strap-rail at that, where they had just half spikes
enough, and pulled them out after the train passed, and drove them
into the other end of the bars, to be ready for the engine when it
returned--rode twelve miles an hour--a mile every five minutes; that
it was good time, and everybody was proud of it. All of which was true.
His auditors are all silent. He has the track; for if one of them ever
rode any more slowly, he is ashamed to let anybody know it!
But there has not been the wonderful increase of speed on railways that
we are led to think. Thus, thirteen years ago last May--1860--at the
time of the Chicago Convention, the train bearing the Eastern delegates
ran from Toledo to Chicago, over the Michigan Southern Road, two
hundred and forty-three miles, in five hours and fifty minutes,--forty
and a half miles an hour. It ran a match race with a train on the
Michigan Central, and reached Chicago twenty-five minutes ahead. It was
a great day for the late John D. Campbell, the Superintendent of the
winning road, when, standing on the steps of the Sherman House in
Chicago, he introduced the Superintendent and passengers of the belated
Central to the crowd brought by the Southern, that were there awaiting
them. Poor Campbell! he has gone to the silent terminus of all earthly
lines. Not long ago, Mr. Vanderbilt and party made a trip from St.
Louis to Toledo, the engines doing their best. The distance is four
hundred and thirty-two miles, the rate forty and one-tenth miles an
hour, the actual running forty-five and a half--an average not
decidedly favorable to continued health or remarkable length of days.
Locomotives never cultivate the grace of patience, though we should
naturally think they would. The more engines there are to puff _for_
us, the more _we_ puff. We chafe at a detention of thirty minutes more
than our grandfathers did, of thirty days. You know the man that
always wants to go faster? Of the twin luxuries of high civilization,
grumbling and the gallows, he enjoys grumbling best. His watch in one
hand, his Guide in the other, and neither right, he compares the
whereabouts of the one with the time of the other. He vows we are
not going fifteen miles an hour when the rate is twenty-five if it
is a rod. His chronic mania is to "_connect_." He didn't "connect"
yesterday, nor the day before, nor any other day, and he never will
"connect" again as long as he lives. He isn't willing the engine should
have a billet of wood or a drop of water. In fact, he is opposed to the
train stopping at all, to let anybody off or on, until he has ridden
out the last inch of his ticket. Denouncing collisions, he hopes that
train Number One--_his_ train is always Number One--will not wait a
minute for Number Two, that is plunging on towards him upon a single
track like a Devil's-darning-needle. "Haven't we got the right of way?"
and that settles it.
The fellow has lost the _escapement_ out of his mental watch-works, and
he runs down as quick as you wind him up. Take him to pieces, and you
will find he has none. Years ago, one of the staunch old Lake steamers
made the quickest trip from Buffalo to Chicago then on the record of
locomotion. Its passengers took a last look of New York and a first
look of Chicago a little nearer together than anybody ever did before.
The writer happened to be on the dock at Chicago when the steamer was
nearing it. "Forward," was a man with a carpet-bag in his hand. He was
a rusty man, as if he had been lost like a pocket-knife, and somebody
had accidentally dug him up. He was trying to get over the guards
somewhere, so as to jump ashore before the steamer "made a landing." He
acted like an unruly steer trying to find a low place in the fence.
Now, as it proved, he was the same man you always see in the cars, who
wants to go faster. He had come from a Schoharie County Hollow, where
the sun never rises till eight o'clock and goes to bed two hours before
night. He had driven a yoke of ruminants and hoof-dividers since
childhood. He was going out West to see an uncle who did not know that
he was coming, and would not have cared a straw if he _had_ known. He
had made the quickest voyage on record, but he was the original man who
wants to go faster.
From the sacred to the profane is, as the world reads, like turning
over a leaf in a book. Admiral Blake, a rough but noble old sea-dog,
who used to take his steamer safely through as dirty weather as ever
slopped a deck, saw this man, and, albeit not the president of any
institution of learning, conferred the degree upon him then and there
of D.D., the two letters being kept at a proper distance by a dash, and
he gave him a name that could hardly have been his father's. It was the
short word that Mr. Froude threw at the New York reporter's head when
he asked the historian how he pronounced his name: "Like double o in
fool, sir." The old Admiral's profanity is thus left scattered through
this sentence in a fragmentary condition. It is hardly worth while to
pick it up and adjust it.
Only this: I never could see the piety of printing an oath with a
_dash_ in it. The wolf's scalp is all you need to have to get the
bounty. To impale an oath upon a straight stick neither hurts the oath
nor helps the swearer. It is profanity by _brevet_, and ought to be
banished from the realm of type. If a man wants to write "infernal,"
and he should not want to write it unless it is proper, let him letter
it squarely out i-n-f-e-r-n-a-l, instead of sneaking into print with
the head and tail of it--in-f-n-l.
There used to be a picture that presented the funny side of the man
who is always a little late. It showed a railway train rolling grandly
out, the fleeces of smoke dotting the route on the air above it. Behind,
at the distance of an eighth of a mile, and losing ground every minute,
as you knew by his looks, was a man, his long hair and his short
coat-skirt leveled away behind him like the two horizontals of the
letter ~F~. He was after the train; he had been left, and those
railroad ties flew out from under his feet at a lively rate. The engine
enjoyed it, and the artist helped to give expression to the creature's
satisfaction, for on every volume of smoke and steam, in letters
constantly growing smaller and feebler as the clouds rolled farther and
farther away, like a faint cry in the distance, he had written the words
"I'VE GOT YOUR TRUNK!"
"I've got your trunk!"
"I've got your trunk!"
"I've got your trunk!"
You could hear that jolly and saucy locomotive say every word of it.
[Illustration: A LITTLE LATE!]
The man who lets himself loose to pursue a train is a public
benefactor. Everybody is pleased with the performance--but the
performer. The loungers on the platform at the station encourage him
with shouts that put "spurs in the sides of his intent." The engineer
leans out at his window and lets the engine whistle for him, and
sometimes slackens a little, just by way of delusive encouragement. The
brakeman on the rear platform seems to be putting on the brakes with
might and main, to hold the train for him to catch it. Passengers
beckon to him, and wave him on with hand and handkerchief. When he lags
a little, the observers cheer him, and he dashes on in prodigious
bursts of speed. Boys whirl up their hats and bet he'll win. But his
heart begins to kick like an unruly colt, and he comes to a halt and
stands like a mile-post and stares after the receding train. Then he
turns and, mopping his face with his handkerchief, walks slowly over
the course. He does not seem anxious to reach the depot, although by
the laughing of the crowd he knows they are all glad to see him coming.
He can count more teeth than he ever saw at one time, except in a
Saginaw gang-saw mill. But he seems to shrink in a modest way from the
greeting he is so sure of.
Now there were Christians in that crowd. There must have been. There
were in Sodom. There are everywhere except among the Modocs. But I am
afraid there was not a Christian on that train or about that station
that in his secret heart wanted that man to catch the cars--that could
have prayed for the achievement, no matter what depended upon it, and
kept his countenance.