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THE WORLD ON WHEELS AND OTHER SKETCHES
THE WORLD ON WHEELS AND OTHER SKETCHES
BY Benj. F. Taylor CHICAGO, S. C. GRIGGS & CO. 1874 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by S. C. GRIGGS & CO., In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. PRINTED AT THE LAKESIDE PRESS, CLARK AND ADAMS STS., CHICAGO. ONLY THIS: The Wheels in this book ran, during the summer of 1873, through the columns of The New York Examiner and Chronicle , to "the head and front of whose offending," the REV. EDWARD BRIGHT, D.D., who gave those wheels "the r
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CHAPTER I. THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT.
CHAPTER I. THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT.
The perpetual lever called a wheel is the masterpiece of mechanical skill. At home on sea and land, like the feet of the Proclaiming Angel, it finds a fulcrum wherever it happens to be. It is the alphabet of human ingenuity. You can spell out with the wheel and the lever—and the latter is only a loose spoke of that same wheel—pretty much everything in the Nineteenth Century but the Christian Religion and the Declaration of Independence. Having thought about it a minute more, I am inclined to exc
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CHAPTER II. THE CONCORD COACH.
CHAPTER II. THE CONCORD COACH.
Fifty miles north of Utica, New York, as the crow flies, there is a village. What there was of it in the old days lay in the bottom of a bay of land bounded on the north, south, and west by wooded hills, with some stone-mason work in them older than the Vatican. But now the beautiful town rises like a spring-tide high up the green sides of the bay. Once in twenty-four hours over the south hill lurched a stage-coach. The tin horn was whipped out of its sheath by the driver, and a short, sharp, na
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CHAPTER III. THE RAGING CANAL.
CHAPTER III. THE RAGING CANAL.
The world has certainly grown. Putting the period just in time, the statement is a safe one—"has certainly grown." When De Witt Clinton developed the Dutch idea in America, and made a line of poetry from tide-water to Lake Erie, which people vilified and christened "Clinton's Ditch," the world was not quite ready for it, and the Governor went ahead in a canal-boat! Fancy that world distanced by a three-horse-power tandem team at six miles an hour to-day. But it was a stately affair then. There w
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CHAPTER IV. THE IRON AGE.
CHAPTER IV. THE IRON AGE.
They tarried longer by the way in those days, and they lived longer, most of them. I think, too, they knew each other better, possibly loved each other more, when they went six miles an hour, than we know each other now that we go sixty. Mind, I would have nobody turn into muriate of soda and make a Lot's wife of himself on my account, but then a harness with neither hold-back nor breeching is a dangerous thing unless the world is a dead level, than which nothing is so very dead, not even a grav
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CHAPTER V. THE IRON HORSE.
CHAPTER V. THE IRON HORSE.
The world had to wait a weary time for its wheels, simply because the successors of Tubal and Jubal took something for granted. It is never safe, as every day's experience proves, to take anything or anybody for granted. The only safety in praising the average man is to hold on to your eulogy till he is dead, and done doing altogether. What the cunning artificers took for granted was this: an engine's pulling power is equal to its own weight. And so they made wheels with teeth, and rails with co
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CHAPTER VI. PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS.
CHAPTER VI. PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS.
They have discovered that our next-door neighbor, the moon, is about the temperature of boiling water. What a splendid locomotive was spoiled just to make a moon! Those of us who are forty years old have been spending the last twenty in unlearning much they had persuaded us to believe in the first ten. No Great African Desert. No Great American Desert. No giants in Patagonia, except little ones. No William Tell, no apple, no target practice. "G. Washington" never had a hatchet. No Maelstrom off
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CHAPTER VII. VICIOUS ANIMALS.
CHAPTER VII. VICIOUS ANIMALS.
A great many animals get on board first-class passenger trains that should have been shipped in box-cars, with sliding doors on the sides. There is Your Railway Hog—the man who takes two seats, turns them vis-a-vis , and makes a letter X of himself, so as to keep them all. Meanwhile, women, old enough to be his mother, pass feebly along the crowded car, vainly seeking a seat, but he gives a threatening grunt, and they timidly look the other way. He is generally rotund as to voice and person, wel
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CHAPTER VIII. HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN.
CHAPTER VIII. HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN.
A locomotive has two habits. It drinks and it smokes. It seems to take comfort in drinking at a liberal river, rather than where the draught is trickled out to it through a stingy pipe on a dry prairie. Climbing heavy grades involves hard drinking. On the Mount Washington Railway, where you travel a mile and rise nineteen hundred feet in an hour and half, the thirsty engine disposes of eighteen hundred gallons of water—all dissipated in breath. During the late war they often watered engines from
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CHAPTER IX. IN THE SADDLE.
CHAPTER IX. IN THE SADDLE.
The engineer and the brakeman are as often and as truly heroes as the average veteran army colonel under fire for the tenth time. True courage, thoughtful kindness, presence of mind, and a quiet bearing, form a four-stranded quality that is never quite perfect if unraveled. How have they all been illustrated! Take the hero of New-Hamburg, on the Hudson River Road, who looked death in the face, and never left the saddle. Take the dying engineer immortalized by the poet of Amesbury, who used the l
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CHAPTER X. RACING AND PLOWING.
CHAPTER X. RACING AND PLOWING.
Two rates of motion are racing and plowing, but, as you shall see, wonderfully alike. An Agricultural Fair has come to mean a Race-Track with a variety of vegetables ranged around on the outside, and a great crowd between the ring of track and the ring of vegetables. There appears to be much doubt as to the propriety of horse-races, but I have never seen a conscientious man who happened by chance to witness a race, that did not make up his mind in a minute which horse he wanted to be the winner.
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CHAPTER XI. SNOW-BOUND.
CHAPTER XI. SNOW-BOUND.
The law of association is a queer piece of legislation. There is the bit of road that used to extend from Toledo, where it connected with the steamer, stage and canal packet, to Adrian, Michigan, where stages took up the broken thread and jolted you on towards sunset. That road always suggests love-apples to the writer! Love-apples in those days, tomatoes in these. It was his first ride upon a railroad; and, reaching Adrian, he for the first time saw and tasted the beautiful fruit that, accordin
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CHAPTER XII. SCALDED TO DEATH.
CHAPTER XII. SCALDED TO DEATH.
Steam has ruined a great many things for us, and spoiled much poetry that was good and true in its time. The songs of the fireside to myriads are dead songs. What do they know about hearths and hickory, of backstick and forestick and topstick, and a great, cheerful fire, with a human smile and a human companionship in it, who camp around an unilluminated hole in the floor, and feel a gust of hot air like a simoon? Did you ever sit before a fireplace in a fall night—an eccentric philologist says
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CHAPTER XIII. ALL ABOARD!
CHAPTER XIII. ALL ABOARD!
A train on the Chicago & Northwestern Road bound for California—a long, full train—a small world on wheels. Everybody's double is aboard. The first twenty-four hours settles things. The little bursts of talk have given out. The great monotone of the wheels sounds over all. In the second twenty-four the small stock of gossip, brought along fresh, is consumed with the last crumbs of the home luncheon that was brought along with it. People begin to show their grain. One man is a bear. He fa
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CHAPTER XIV. EARLY AND LATE.
CHAPTER XIV. 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 tw
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CHAPTER XV. DEAD HEADS.
CHAPTER XV. DEAD HEADS.
"D. H." Everybody knows what D. H. is. He sees it on the telegram that costs him nothing. He sees it in the glass when he looks at himself, if he rides free upon the train—Dead Head. It never had a pleasant sound, and lately it has grown almost opprobrious. In the beginning, the courtesy of a pass was extended to the drivers of the quill. The editor and his family and his wife's mother and the pressman and the devil all rode scot-free. Then State Lycurguses en masse with their families and their
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CHAPTER XVI. WORKING "BY THE DAY."
CHAPTER XVI. WORKING "BY THE DAY."
Something is written elsewhere of the graveyard luncheons they took in the Sunday noonings. Those were the times when the minister worked by the day. The Sunday school in the morning, for the lambs led off the flock. Then a hymn on both sides of the threshold of prayer, and a little carpet of Scripture laid down before it. The preacher would read the hymn, and say, "Sing five verses;" and if he did not happen to put up the bars in this way across the narrow lane of praise, the choir were bound t
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CHAPTER XVII. A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER.
CHAPTER XVII. A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER.
The Railroad is a slanderer. It maligns cities. With few exceptions it sneaks into town; enters it by the cheapest end, as politicians say of candidates, the most "available" way. By-the-by, is the "available" aspirant for office always the cheapest? It comes in by people's backdoors; it sees mops swinging like "banners on the outer wall;" it overlooks hen-houses; it flanks pig-pens; it manufactures dead ducks and gone geese; it commands barnyards. Take La Porte, on the Lake Shore Railroad—one o
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CHAPTER XVIII. DREAMING ON THE CARS.
CHAPTER XVIII. 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-jour
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CHAPTER XIX. "MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT."
CHAPTER XIX. "MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT."
There were two steamers on Lake Erie that were twins. They were, in their time, and not so long ago, models of steamboat architecture; elegant as palaces, and in every respect as nearly alike as builders and artists could make them. Their names were Northern Indiana and Southern Michigan . The writer and "his next best friend" took passage upon one of them bound East. It was a mid-summer night. The moon at the full, and her ladyship did what all poets, since moons and poets were, have said she d
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CHAPTER XX. THE MAKER OF CITIES.
CHAPTER XX. 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 e
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CHAPTER XXI. A CABOOSE RIDE.
CHAPTER XXI. 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 wa
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CHAPTER XXII. HATCHING OUT A WOMAN.
CHAPTER XXII. 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 c
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CHAPTER XXIII. A FLANK MOVEMENT.
CHAPTER XXIII. A FLANK MOVEMENT.
In war and peace all people are afraid of a flank movement. General Sherman, though he never quite found out what newspapers are for, did discover that the Federal strength was in the enemy's flanks. In other words, if the Confederate army had been finished off prematurely like a pictorial cherub, he would have had nothing to punish. It is said to be a dreadful strain upon a man's muscles to kick at nothing! In a railway car a man is apt to be flanked by somebody—a small army of observation in t
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CHAPTER XXIV. LIGHT AND SHADE.
CHAPTER XXIV. LIGHT AND SHADE.
The saddest train upon which the writer ever took passage was the Hospital Train, with its maimed and mangled burden, that ran from the still, white tents of Stevenson, Ala., to Nashville, Tenn., just after the battle of Chickamauga. There was no lack of ventilation, for some of the cars were platforms—the kind that make Martyrs, but not Presidents. Not much finish in precious woods anywhere that you could see. It rained heavily and persistently through the twelve hour trip, and there the wounde
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CHAPTER XXV. PRECIOUS CARGOES.
CHAPTER XXV. PRECIOUS CARGOES.
The richest cargo in the world is a cargo of Time , and the locomotive was made to draw it. Yesterday I saw a man who tugged his household goods and gods from East to West in thirty days. To be sure, the roads had three dimensions, length, breadth and— thickness ;—who ever knew a migrant to flit in pleasant weather?—but he drove early and late, and tired out the family dog and took him aboard—the dog that had developed his muscles in digging out woodchucks and shaking pole-cats to pieces in the
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CHAPTER I. MY STARRY DAYS.
CHAPTER I. MY STARRY DAYS.
There are some stars to which, in my boyhood, I was wont to lay special claim. Perhaps everybody is. I never thought of their being out of the jurisdiction of the State of New York, where I first began to "see stars," not meaning those early experiments upon the glare ice of Leonard's Pond, when my heels went up like Mercury's, and my head went down like the flintlock of an old Queen's arm. One large ripe star used to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods—I loved to fancy it would lodge
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CHAPTER II. "No. 104,163."
CHAPTER II. "No. 104,163."
"The great Mercantile Library Enterprise of San Francisco," so I read in my evening paper, "will positively distribute its prizes on the 31st of October. Tickets, five dollars in gold." And then I turned to the glittering roll of fortunes. There they were, heaped up in an auriferous pyramid curiously balanced on its apex. At the bottom lay a poor little "$100 in gold," not worth minding, and up swelled the shining structure,—$1,000—$5,000—$10,000—$25,000— $50,000—until away at the top blazed cle
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CHAPTER III. OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER.
CHAPTER III. OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER.
"I find the marks of my shortest steps beside those of my beloved mother, which were measured by my own," says Dumas, and so conjures up one of the sweetest images in the world. He was revisiting the home of his infancy; he was retracing the little paths around it in which he had once walked; and strange flowers could not efface, and rank grass could not conceal, and cruel ploughs could not obliterate, his "shortest footsteps," and his mother's beside them, measured by his own. And who needs to
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CHAPTER IV. OUT-DOOR PREACHING.
CHAPTER IV. OUT-DOOR PREACHING.
The miracle of Spring is beginning. Leafless, indeed, stand the great woods, and shivering in the cold North wind. The joints of rheumatic oaks creak dismally, and there is a moan in the maples. The skeleton orchards are gray and brown upon the Southern slopes, but the sun is shining and the clock of Time ticks in the heart of May. A January fire rolls and roars up the chimney's capacious throat; the water-pail is nightly glazed with ice, but the birds are abroad and their songs are in all the a
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CHAPTER V. THE STORY OF THE BELL.
CHAPTER V. THE STORY OF THE BELL.
The Roman knight who rode, all accoutred as he was, into the gulf, and the mouth of the hungry Forum closed upon him and was satisfied, vanquished, in his own dying, that great Philistine, Oblivion, which, sooner or later, will conquer us all. But there is an old story that always charmed me more. In some strange land and time they were about to cast a bell for a mighty tower; a hollow, starless heaven of iron. It should toll for dead monarchs—"the king is dead!"—and make glad clamor for the new
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CHAPTER VI. "MY EYE!"
CHAPTER VI. "MY EYE!"
That sounds like slang, and I have quoted it lest somebody should think it original; but then there is really no more slang in it, as I apply it, than there is in Agur's prayer—the man who wanted what could be spared precisely as well as not, and who proposed to make his pantaloons without any pockets. The application changes the nature. Thus, I spread mustard upon a piece of linen and clap it upon the nape of a fellow's neck, and it is a blister. I veneer therewith a pink and white slice of Isr
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CHAPTER VII. THE OLD ROAD.
CHAPTER VII. THE OLD ROAD.
In almost every old neighborhood there is an old road, disused and half forgotten, and we like to get away from the traveled thoroughfare, and wander, in a summer's day, along its deserted route. Our grandfathers had a species of indomitable directness in making roads and making love that was wonderful to see. They did not believe in the line of beauty; there was nothing curvilinear about them, either in word or deed. They went by square and compass, and life and religion were laid out like Solo
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CHAPTER VIII. A BIRD HEAVEN.
CHAPTER VIII. A BIRD HEAVEN.
Does any theological reason exist why there should not be in some blessed planet or other a Bird Heaven, a realm where the green gates of Spring are forever opening and the fruits of Summer are for ever ripening, whose skies are full of the downiest of clouds and the softest of songs? Were I to be constituted the Peter of the gate of that Paradise, there are very few birds to which free entrance should not be given, except Cochin China, Shanghai, and Bramah Pootrah hens; the raven should be admi
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