A CABOOSE RIDE.
Has it ever happened to you to be left somewhere, and nothing to get
away upon but a freight train? And did the train happen to be running
on an Express train's time, and did you make the flitting in the night?
If "yes," you remember it. The writer was at Friendship, in the State
of New York. It adjoins the town of Amity, whose post-office ought to
be Fraternity. What a dreadful thing this "calling names" has become!
Down that same Erie Road is Scio, and not a man of them can tell where
Homer was buried. Then we have Cuba and Castile, and nothing Spanish
or Castilian in either of them, except the Castile _soap_ at the
druggist's. Avon, without Shakspeare; Caledonia, and nobody to bless
the Duke of Argyle for a scratching-post; Warsaw, that Campbell does
not sing of in his "Pleasures of Hope;" Ararat, and no sign of Noah's
ark; Waterloo, that Bonaparte never lost; Cato, Ovid, Camillus,
Marcellus, and all the rest of them.
To return to the freight train: You climb aboard, and entering the
caboose sit down before you mean to, the thing giving a plunge just
before you are ready. Four or five men are disposed about the car. They
are drovers. You think you have blundered into a barnyard. Those men
have their outdoor voices with them. Their frequent conversations with
herds have made them boisterous and breezy as the month of March. The
society of cattle is not always refining, especially of cattle to kill.
You don't see anybody reading poetry. The stove burns wood, and not
coal, but the car is smutty for all that. They use many good words, but
they don't seem to understand the _arrangement_ of them. You begin
to be sorry you did not tarry at Jericho for the passenger train. But
these men are kind-hearted. One of them moves along and lets you sit
within six inches of the stove that, unless like a blackberry, it is
red when it is green, must be dead ripe.
The car is a short caboose, fashioned like a small, ill-shaped back
kitchen, and it has no more wheels than a one-horse wagon, which gives
it an uneasy and suggestive way on the track. A brakeman sits with his
head swung out at a window. The conductor sits with his watch in his
hand. Nobody has any business there at all. The engineer is doing his
best to make a distant station, and get upon the side-track before the
Express wants the road. You find this out by degrees. It makes you feel
light, but not airy. The kitchen rocks like a cradle for a dozen rods,
and then jounces the light out and the water-barrel over and your hat
off, and the stove rattles like a smithy in a driving time. Then it
gathers itself up like a salient goat, and bounces against the bumper
of the next car and something snaps. No matter.
The train swings around a curve, and you feel as you did years ago when
you were the last boy on the string in the game of "snap the whip." You
steady your lower jaw a little, and ask the conductor if he is going to
stop before he stops for good, to-wit: meets the Express, and he says,
"Genesee!" It occurs to you that he has mentioned the very place you
are bound for, though you never heard of it before. The conductor
informs you it is safe to bet we are "just dusting," and you believe
him--the _only_ safe thing about the train. It is thirty miles an
hour. Another head is hung out of a window, and you think you'll try to
count fence-posts. It doesn't happen to be a fence, but a stockade; and
as for telegraph-poles, you have seldom observed them thicker to the
mile. You look forward, and see lights down the track. Drawing in like
a turtle, you tell the conductor. "What is it, Joe?" and the brakeman
replies "Nothin'." The conductor puts his watch to his ear. Has it
stopped? With rattle and roar the engineer keeps launching the train
into the midnight. A shrill shriek of the locomotive whistles you up,
and you are on your feet like a cat. The brakeman runs up his little
iron ladder, the speed slackens, the train comes to a dead halt. It is
Genesee, and one grateful passenger leaves that frantic caboose, to set
foot in it, as he fervently prays, "nevermore."