THE MAKER OF CITIES.
No matter how carefully you freight a train, there is always something
gets on board that never appears on the bill of lading. Day after day
you see Alexandrine caravans pounding away to Iowa, burdened with
Michigan forests that sawmills have laughed over in their rough, coarse
way. It is called lumber, but it _is_ a county capital, a whole
village, a happy home. Score out with the double bars of the railroad
a broad page of the open book of the fertile wilderness, sink a
well somewhere that the engine can halt to drink, and a shanty,
weather-beaten as a wasp's nest, will come down in a few days over the
roll of the prairie, and treat itself to some new clap-boards and a
coat of paint white as a sepulchre, and there it will stand close
beside the track to see the cars go by.
Soon, another will creep up from the bushy run and range itself
alongside, and ten to one that it will shout at you in monstrous pica
lettered along its whole front, METROPOLITAN HOTEL! You have always
observed that the smaller the inn the bigger the title, much after the
fashion of the naturalists who "call names," and denominate a harmless
little chimney-swallow an Hirundo Pelasgia! Then more houses, a church
with a chuckle-headed belfry, a school-house, a store, all white as
this week's washing. Then one money-purse of a mail-bag will be thrown
off from a passing train upon the depot platform, and another handed on
as easily as a woman's work-pocket.
The village is christened Athens, it has a P.M., and when a little
village grows to have a P.M., it is getting pretty well along towards
A.M. Day has fairly broke. Untilled breadths of prairie round about
begin to show scars. The plow is busy. They set out trees, and settle a
minister and hire a schoolma'am. They fit up a hall over a store, and
call it Apollo. A man comes along with a composing-stick in his pocket
and starts a newspaper. It is the _Clarion_. The editor thanks one
man for a pumpkin and measures it. He confesses to a turkey and
acknowledges the corn. He says he is amazed at the great West. A young
lawyer gets off the cars, and immediately another. A solitary lawyer is
useless. What would Robinson Crusoe have done had he been an attorney?
His story would have been _brief_, and no red tape to tie it with.
No, a couple of lawyers are like two halves of a pair of shears. You
need them both for the cutting purposes of the legal instrument. Two
doctors are there already. Then an artist arrives with his house on
wheels, and backs it upon a vacant lot next to the "Metropolitan," and
there it is, with a monstrous lobster-like eye in the top, and the
girls and their "fellows" come in from around about to be taken--come
in their best; great healthy girls, wearing three or four dresses
apiece, each shorter than the other, and all flounced, or fluted, or
something.
The railway has brought the fashions. It also brought that Chinese
abomination, a gong. The "Metropolitan" has one, and it frightened an
innocent man into running away with a span of horses, and they never
got him. It also threw a feeble woman into convulsions who had been
reading Gordon's Adventures in Africa--not the "lord" of that ilk. She
either thought it was a lion or she was in Africa, but she never
explained. The rival hotel, called "The Orient," because it is located
in the Occident, and completed yesterday, has not attained to gongs. It
only rings a bell.
A barber arrives. His fathers, some of them, were from the coast of
Guinea. He is table-waiter at the Metropolitan. Likewise an artist on
leather, with dramatic tendencies, for he strikes an attitude and
cries, "What boots it!" and then laughs like a general alarm in a
poultry-yard. He is ostler at the Metropolitan, also porter. He
punishes a fiddle for the dancers at the Apollo. He shaves.
The Methodists came first. They have a choir with a pitch-pipe to it.
Next the Baptists, with a melodeon. They both will try for an organ
next year. THE EXAMINER has a club bigger than can be cut anywhere
within four miles of Athens.
And this Athens is as much the product of the locomotive as a puff of
steam. It made things possible. The next thing the prince of modern
genii does, is to bolt the track without tumbling into the ditch. It
goes across-lots to some sleepy little ante-railroad Corners, that was
the county-seat aforetime, and trails the Court-house, by a figure of
speech, back to Athens, and it becomes the Capital! All the boys are
aching to do something whereby they may get into the new jail. At last
the Sheriff catches a rogue and locks him up, and the boys are
satisfied. The thin lawyer with the thin tin sign becomes Judge, and
also fatter. It was a graveyard they had over at the Corners, a
straggling place where people lay down wherever they pleased, and
nobody said a word. Things are not thus in Athens. They have laid out
a--cemetery, with some pretension to beauty, and have traced it off
with paths and avenues like the lines upon the palm of a hand. They
also have a hearse. So has the Corners, but then Athens has _plumes_,
when people die that can afford it.
There are a briskness of step and a precision of speech about the
people of a railway creation that you never find in a town that is only
accessible to a stage-driver, and where they go sauntering about like a
Connecticut one-horse chaise. There it is always three o'clock till it
is four. In Athens never. From the depot with its time-table to the
dusky factotum of the "Metropolitan," everybody carries a watch. He
compares it with the standard at the depot once a day. He consults it
upon all possible occasions. If you begin to preach, he times you from
the text. If you marry him to somebody, he whips out his repeater, and
sees just how long you were about it. The second-hand, so useless in a
lazy old town, is magnified in importance to a crowbar. You ask him the
time, and he tells you "Number Six, due here at two o'clock and one
minute, has just gone. I'm thirty seconds slow. It's two o'clock and
four minutes!" And there you have the time almost accurate enough for
an astronomer. The locomotive is an accomplished educator. It teaches
everybody that virtue of princes we call punctuality. It waits for
nobody. It demonstrates what a useful creature a minute is in the
economy of things.
The West is full of Athenses that were. They have grown greater and
better. They star the prairies as constellations the heavens. They have
grown more modest and less pretentious with time. Villages, like girls,
have "a hateful age." There is a period, too, in the life of villages,
when they resemble that red-nightcapped carpenter, the woodpecker--they
are biggest when first hatched.