HATCHING OUT A WOMAN.
When the necromancer turns farmer, sows a few kernels of wheat in a
little tin-box of earth, claps on the cover, sends a few sparks of
electricity through it, whips off the lid and shows you the green
blades an inch and a half long, in a minute and a half, it is a
phenomenon, but not a miracle. You can see something quite as marvelous
in the World on Wheels any day. Enter a well-filled car in "the wee
small hours ayont the twal." The light is dim but not religious with
the uncertain glimmer of candles or the smoky flare of kerosene, which
ought to be banished from every civilized and Christian road. The seats
are heaped with shapeless piles of clothes. Folks are shut up like
jack-knives or bagged like game. Here and there a head is visible,
swaying about when there isn't any wind, as if everything had "lodged"
except a bearded stalk now and then. By-and-by the gray, cold,
unspeculative dawn begins to show at the East windows, and there is a
stir among the bundles. A man with hair over his front like a Shetland
pony's mane emerges from a blanket. A boy with the head of a distaff
changes ends. A girl blossoms out in the next seat.
But there is one large heap of clothes that you watch, and they are
good ones. A dainty hat with a feather in it swings from the rack above
by one string. A muff like a well-to-do cat reposes in the wire manger.
The bundle appears to be composed of cloaks, shawls, and a lap-robe. It
is _shaped_ like an egg, and it _is_ an egg. First one shawl gives a
little lift, then another. There is a slight surge of a cloak. Off goes
a shawl. A snug gaiter with a foot in it emerges at one end, and a
disheveled head at the other. Forth comes a hand, and at last the
chrysalis is rent, and the occupant is hatched out before your eyes.
But it is anything but a butterfly. It is a crumpled, drowsy piece of
womanhood, who slept in her head but not in her hair.
The trying, pitiless light of early morning plays upon her
terrifically, and she knows it. It amuses you to watch her under your
eyelids. She brings forth from her reticule a liver-shaped device, and
she hangs it on behind, like the fender of a canal-boat, just over her
combativeness and philo-progenitiveness, and what not. Then she
arranges and sorts out curls and ringlets for different organs. You
ought to see that head. It grows like a soap-bubble. She claps a love
of a friz on her self-esteem, which allies her to angels; a coil of
curl upon her firmness, which brings her, sometimes, within neighborly
distance of donkeys; she borders her brow with ringlets, trails a braid
about her inhabitiveness and constructiveness, touches up the tress on
her veneration, and the head is artistically complete. She washes her
face with a handkerchief, rights her collar, shakes out the creases,
tosses the little hat upon the top of all things, and is ready for
breakfast. Who talks of necromantic _wheat_, when here is a human
_flower_ hatched from an awkward bundle in less than thirty minutes!
When you take a train with a _harem_ in it--I use the word in its
originally clean sense--and you have no _personal_ interest in the
harem, you are apt to fare badly. The train is meant where the women
are sorted out for one car, and what is left is just turned into
another. It is a vicious fashion, and fosters the art of lying. There
goes a young man at the heels of a lady whom he never saw before, or
spoke to in his life, and he is carrying a spick-and-span new bandbox.
My word for it, it is as empty as a church contribution-box on Saturday
afternoon. He bought that box for precisely that emergency. The lady
ascends the platform. So does the bandbox. The brakeman opens the door,
and the young man slips in unquestioned, and secures a comfortable
seat. He means to study for the ministry, and he has been lying by
bandbox!
There is another man. He appears to be a good man. You are sure he is,
and he stands where the brakeman can see him, and touches his hat to a
window of the harem where nobody is sitting, and then, with a little
smiling affectionate haste, he skips up the steps and says, "Please let
me in a minute!" and in he goes. That unfortunate man never beheld a
face in that car in all his life. The more you think of it the more
vicious the fashion seems. It does not benefit the ribbons, and is a
positive damage to the whiskers. Pen men up together, and if they do
not act like cattle it will be in spite of the pen! Women sprinkled
through the cars keep the train upon its honor, if not upon the track,
and elevate the lumbering thing from a common carrier to an educator.
Flying bedrooms are among the crowning achievements of railway travel.
They are gorgeous. They remind you--the most of them--of the Hall of
Representatives at Washington, which in its turn suggests a Chinese
pagoda. They are luxuries. If you don't mind plunging endwards through
your dreams at forty miles an hour; and if you don't care whom you
sleep with; and if you never catch cold; and if you have no "reasonable
doubt" as to getting out, provided the bed-room is mistaken for a
dice-box, some night, and you are sure you will not come within an ace
of throwing the deuce, there is nothing like them. Snores in many
languages are let loose upon you, and feet from many boots. The porter
has an appetite for boots. He sits up at night to get yours, no matter
where you put them, and there he is in the morning, the boots in one
hand and nothing in the other. It is pleasant, also, to have the
drapery of your couch whisked one side every few minutes, just as you
have dropped off into a doze, and a strange hand passed over your face,
by somebody blundering about in quest of his berth.
Flying drawing-rooms _deserve_ what winged bed-rooms _need_--unmitigated
praise. The clank of wheels is shut out. You exult to the angles of
your elbows, because there is room for them. You can go about in your
revolving chair like a shingle chanticleer upon a barn-ridge. You read
quietly, write comfortably, converse easily. It is home adrift.