DREAMING ON THE CARS.
When a man travels, what material baggage he takes is _im_material, but
he leaves behind him a great deal of mental and moral _impedimenta_.
There used to be a saying among the traders to Santa Fé, "If there is
any dog in a man he will show it out on the trail." During the war,
people going to the front were astonished to learn what manner of
people some of their nearest neighbors really were. It is so in the
world on wheels. Men and women show out wonderfully. But whatever you
put on to go a-journeying, even to that new silk hat, if you must,
never put on _airs_. They are altogether too gauzy to be warm in
winter, or decent in summer. Many a woman has told you, without
intending it, that the entertainment she regarded with such measureless
contempt is better than anything she ever encountered at home. Clothes
have become transparent as window-glass. They utterly fail as a
disguise.
You grow conscious on a railway train, as nowhere else, what trifles go
to make up the warp and woof of life. Thus, you catch yourself watching
an old-fashioned man with an ancient hat that was beaver in its time.
He takes it off and holds it in his hand. You wonder how it has come to
look so like its owner. It has a character, and the character is the
man's. Then the heavy roll of his coat-collar, with a padded look,
reminds you of the picture of George the First, the Last, and the
All-the-Time, to-wit: George Washington. You think G. W.'s face is much
like a tin lantern with no holes in it to let out the light, and about
as--is it profanity, or _what_ is it?--about as _stupid_ a face as
there is going. To be sure, it has a solid look, and so has a round of
beef.
You look up just then, and, yonder in the corner facing you, sits a man
of sixty, frosty, Octoberish, square face, double chin, hair long and
curly, pleasant eyes, all surmounted by a broad-brimmed hat. You start
at the resemblance; it is as much like Benjamin Franklin, printer, as
one picture is like another.
Then you wonder what that lady over across the aisle is trying to get
out of that bottle with a knitting-needle. You watch, and she spears
away until she brings out a little pickle. You notice a couple
whispering and giggling, and making objects of themselves generally,
and you marvel why, when young married people travel in the cars by
sunlight, they don't let the honeymoon set, or change, or something.
The train stops at a station among the pines--you are on a Wisconsin
road--and little girls come to your window with small clusters of
wintergreen berries, set off with a few glossy leaves. You buy a fresh
woodsy taste of spring, and then follow the girls away to their humble
homes among the sand-hills, and fancy how they live and what they hope.
The train halts at a station in Maryland--you are on the train from
Washington to New York--and dusky boys and maidens, born on the shady
side of humanity, swarm around with neat little paper-boxes, with
a layer of fried oysters looking as light and frisky as your
grandmother's fritters. The ivory smiles are very pleasant to see, and
before you know it you are humming "Way down in Alabama," and sorrowing
that some of the sweetest melodies in the world since the daughters of
Judah hung their harps on the willows, should have dropped out of
fashion like lead down a shot-tower, and wondering what poet, what
historian, will yet preserve the legends and songs of the days of the
Old Plantation. Then you wander away to Holy Land, and consider what
punishment should be meted out to the man who has just been telling
us--and wants to be thanked for it!--that the trees those Jewish Girls
hung their harps on--those sweet-voiced girls, with the blue-black
hair--were not willows at all, but _poplars_! Old-fashioned people
call them "popples." Fancy a singer hanging her harp on a popple! Then,
there is now and then a lady who has a sort of petroleum-fortune
refinement, who speaks of a poplar-tree as a "popular," much as if she
should fancy that engineer is a sort of corruption of _indianeer_.
All these things are dreadful, but a popple-hung harp is worse.
The train pulls up at a station in Virginia, and a barefoot girl
approaches you with flowers to sell--fragrant Magnolias, and the most
graceful and grateful offering of all, and you fall to thinking if
anything so beautiful will ever be named after you, as this magnolia
was, after that Professor Magnol. Happy Magnol! The flowers should
grace his tablet in the fairest of white marble. Now you pass through
the apple region of New York, and the chestnut woods of Ohio. You know
both, by the swarms of small Buckeyes bearing chestnuts, and the bits
of Excelsiors loaded with Greenings and Baldwins.
Then you fall to watching the man with the new silk hat. Every body
does. It is not an irritated hat, for it shines like a bottle. He
bought it yesterday, and is going a thousand miles immediately. The
head seems to have been made just to have some handy place to put the
hat. That hat thus put comes into the car. Its support is seated,
carefully applies a thumb and finger to both sides of the brim, and
lifts it perpendicularly off, much as if his ears ran up into the top
of it, and he would lift it away without touching their tips. He looks
at it. It caught a little bump as he entered the car, and there is the
mark. He smooths it with a finger in a sorrowful way, reaches up, and
puts it in the rack _crown_ down. Then he settles to the journey,
thinks again, elongates, and puts that hat _brim_ down. This satisfies
him.
In a few minutes he rises, gives that castor another turn, as if it
were a kaleidoscope and he bound to have one peep more, and deposits
it upon its side. At the instant he is about to let go of it the car
gives a frolicsome lurch, and that hat catches a jam. He withdraws it
tenderly, and there is the scar. It _looks_ like the kick of a
vicious horse, but it _is_ the work of an ass to wear such a thing
on a journey. What sort of a figure would Moses have cut with a silk
hat, in the last years--say the thirty-eighth of them--of his
Wilderness wanderings? Well, the man whips out his handkerchief, and
allays the irritation of the angry hat. He applies his tongue to it as
if for some healing quality, claps it upon his head, and, wearied with
physical exertion and mental anxiety, falls asleep. He is _not_
Jupiter, but he resembles him, for he "nods," and that unhappy tile
tumbles, strikes the back of the seat with the _thrum_ of a feeble
tambourine, and bounds sepulchrally along the floor. A man puts his
foot upon it in his haste to be neighborly, and "when the man with it"
recovers the unlucky bit of head-gear, it looks like a short-joint of
stove pipe that somebody has wildly hammered and wickedly sworn at
because it would neither go inside nor outside. But the man with the
new silk hat never falters. He carries a head to put the hat on. He
carries a hat-box to put the hat in. He makes a right angle of himself,
and sets his hat right side down upon his lap, as if about to play an
endless game of "pin." You saw him yesterday. There is "an eternal
fitness in things," even in _hats_.
They used to tell--in old times more than now--of "presenting the
freedom" of this and that, London or Amsterdam, or what not, to
somebody "in a gold box." That is not the ceremony in later days. They
present you "the freedom" of the world on wheels, if you can pay for
the _ticket_. On a California-bound train you met a lady. Not to
indulge in any pleasant euphemism, she was a half century old, but then
she was strong and womanly, and apparently no nearer death than when
she was handed about in long-clothes. She was the mother of men. She
was the wife of an English physician and botanist; I should say
"scientist," but if there is a mean word in the language, it is that
same "scientist." It reminds me of nothing but a thin, offensive bug,
that has been subjected to the pressure of a vindictive thumb-nail.
She was unattended. She had a ticket that shut over and over like a
Japanese book. It was good from London to--New Zealand! Across two
oceans, Atlantic and Pacific; across the American continent. She was
bound home. She ate strawberries, she said, with her husband and "the
boys," just before she left New Zealand. She ate strawberries with her
sister at the parting meal in London; and, as she smilingly added, "I
shall be in time for strawberries and cream at San Francisco."
No more nervous anxiety about the lady borne on wheels around the
globe, than if she had been walking under the palms in her Australasian
home. You could not help thinking, as you regarded her pleasant face,
of the Malay of the old Geography dressed in a towel, amidst a far-away
and inaccessible scene of tropic luxuriance, only to be found after
months of tossing by sea and perils by land, of cannibals and beasts of
prey; and here she was, going directly there to her charming English
home in the South Pacific seas, with that crown-jewel of the firmament,
the Southern Cross, in sight. How pitifully shriveled, like a last
year's filbert, is Tom Moore's little song about the Irish Norah, who
went on foot and alone around the Emerald Isle unharmed--
"On she went, and her maiden smile
In safety lighted her round the Green Isle"--
beside the tremendous arc of circumnavigation the Doctor's wife was
describing without a flutter!
So all these trifles beguile the way, keep the mental watch from
running down in your pocket, until the brakeman earns his supper by
telling you where you can earn yours, as he shouts through the car,
"Twenty minutes for supper!"