Benjamin F. Taylor

“ The freedom of the planet should be his.
And the world adjoining, and lying in full sight, should be a Tophet for the slayers of robins and sparrows; the men whom want of worth makes "fellows"; who lurk about the woods, in the yet unraveled leaf, and prowl in the orchards white with the sweet drift of apple-blossoms, and murder the builders of the homes of song; the ruffians who, in bright top-boots and game-bag cap-a-pie, return elated with two dead blue-birds and a lark without a head, who break a thrush's wing, and misname it "sport," and pass disguised as men. ”

“ What speed in the engine; what priceless cargoes of time and oxygen upon the train; how fast and long we live in a little while! Let us be glad. Uneasy people sometimes wish they had been born in the days of Alexander, or Moses, or Methuselah, or somebody who looms up gigantically in the mists of history. It is better to live in the days of the Steam-engine. It has conquered more worlds than Alexander, traversed vaster wildernesses than the Israelite, and reclaimed them as it went; and behold, by the power of the Engine we live to be hundreds of years old, and never give it a thought! ”

“ He haunts the baggage-car like a "perturbed spirit." He ends with a small knapsack, an overcoat and a linen duster. Bosom, collar, wristbands, he does himself up in paper like a curl. He is as clean round the edges as the margins of a new book.
We throw away a great deal of baggage on the life journey that we cannot well spare; a young heart, bright recollections of childhood, friends of the years that are gone. And so we "fly light," but we do not fly well.
Let us approach the baggage-man with tenderness. Let us tender him a quarter, if he in turn will give quarter to our trunk. ”

“ Take that piece of animated nature called the commercial traveler, who slings his little knapsack under his left shoulder-blade and says, "the world is mine oyster!" He is as much a product of the locomotive as a puff of steam. He is a wholesale store in a pair of boots. The great house in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, is trundled about the world by sample, and he girds up his loins and keeps it company. The engine has made him possible. He is about as wonderful as the Arabian Genius that came out of the little bottle and clouded all the land. ”

“ But the engine pries them apart as it plunges on, and makes a track of them. The locomotive quickens your pulse, but it does more. It quickens vegetation, and makes things light and frisky. See that little bush squat to the ground, like a hare in her form. It grows before your eyes. It is a big bush, a little tree, a full-grown maple, that gave down the sap for the sugar-camp kettle in your grandfathers time. There are a couple of portly hay-stacks, like two Dutch burghers of the Knickerbocker days, growing fatter every minute, and waddling out of the way to let the train go by. ”

“ The locomotive engineer is as quiet as a Quaker meeting. One driver of a four-horse coach will make more noise than a dozen of him. There he is with his hand upon the iron lever, and looks forth from his little window. If he wants to say something confidentially to a street crossing, there is the bell-tongue. If he wishes to throw a word or two back to the brakeman, or make a short speech to a distant depot, there is the whistle. He pats his engine, and calls it "she." Its name is Whirling Cloud or Rolling Thunder or Vampire or Vanderbilt, but it is "she" all the time. ”

“ The bars of the trans-continental railroad had careened the horizon with their mighty leverage, and let the cargo through—the very cargo for which they waited in the old days with their faces toward the rising sun, like a praying Israelite. The locomotive had wheeled the rolling globe a half revolution, brought the tide of commerce to the right-about, like a soldier upon his heel. It has proved to be anything but what it was suspected of being—the locomotive has—for, made to be a common carrier, a gigantic, quicktime dray-horse, it is a civilizer, a builder of cities ”

“ She sits down by the little wheel—a tress is running through her fingers from the distaff's disheveled head, when a small voice cries "Grandma!" from the old red cradle, and "Grandma!" Tommy shouts from the top of the stairs. Gently she lets go the thread, for her patience is almost as beautiful as her charity, and she touches the little bark in a moment, till the young voyager is in a dream again, and then directs Tommy's unavailing attempts to harness the cat. The tick of the clock runs faint and low, and she opens the mysterious door and proceeds to wind it up. ”

“ Again, you are on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway. You land at Emporia, Kansas, one hundred and twenty-eight miles from Kansas City. The locomotive breasts the prairie in panoply as glittering as anywhere. You find a brisk and busy town, well-filled stores, elegant houses, capital schools, a public library, and intelligent and hospitable people. The railroad was Pharaoh's daughter to it. It found the little Moses in the bulrushes, and made Emporia a marvel in the wilderness. You see last week's New York fashions in the streets, the latest works of literature upon the tables. ”

“ Did you ever ride on a snow-plow? Not the pet and pony of a thing that is attached to the front of an engine, sometimes, like a pilot, but a great two-storied monster of strong timbers, that runs upon wheels of its own, and that boys run after and stare at, as they would after, and at, an elephant. You are snow-bound at Buffalo. The Lake Shore Line is piled with drifts like a surf. Two passenger trains have been half-buried for twelve hours somewhere in snowy Chautauqua. The storm howls like a congregation of Arctic bears. ”

“ The machine backs away and keeps backing, as a gymnast runs astern to get sea-room and momentum for a big jump; as a giant swings aloft a heavy sledge that it may come down with a heavy blow. One whistle! You have come to a halt. Three pairs of whistles one after another, and then, putting on all steam, you make for the drift. The Superintendent locks the door, you do not quite understand why, and in a second the battle begins. The machine rocks and creaks in all its joints. There comes a tremendous shock. The cabin is as dark as midnight. The clouds of flying snow put out the day. ”

“ Think of a ponderous engine, fashioned to grind miles under its wheels like a grist in a mill, being drawn, as one was a short time ago, under the Arch of Constantine at Rome, along the very road whereon the robe of Cicero trailed, if he didn't lift it, and the weak-eyed poet strolled! Classic ground or Holy ground, it stands a poor chance with the locomotive, for with the steam comes the newsboy, the boot-black, modern slang, irreverence, and—peanuts.
No piece of mechanism has affected so widely, diversely and powerfully, the globe and its inhabitants, as the locomotive. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ That chafed and sturdy limb has borne a weight more precious than its leaves. Upon the stout old arm, swayed to and fro like canaries in a ring, swung clusters of laughing girls and boys, and then beneath it, hand-in-hand, made bows and courtesies to the passing traveler, while tattered hats of straw and wool tossed here and there proclaimed the coming stage. Ah! there were days when, over the old road, ran the yellow, mud-stained coach; laboring up its hills, and pitching along its log-ways, and lurching in its deep-worn tracks, and rattling down its steeps, and splashing through its brooks. ”

“ Taylor is a word-painter unsurpassed in America. His style is rare, quaint, full of images as a brook of pebbles, and his rhythm waves and undulates as softly and as sensuously as the wind that sways the summer wheat. * * In the fields he sings the songs of the spring, and the passion flowers, of the roses, and the summer time. His are the birds'-notes. He interprets the quaint, low tune of the busy wren, the soaring snatches of the sky-lark, the liquid language of the oriole, the ever-sad and questioning call of the partridge, and the pheasant's everlasting monotone. ”

“ But it was not of the mother, but of the dear old-fashioned grandmother, whose thread of love spun "by hand" on life's little wheel, and longer and stronger than they make it now, was wound around and about the children she saw playing in the children's arms, in a true love-knot that nothing but the shears of Atropos could sever; for do we not recognize the lambs sometimes, when summer days are over and autumn winds are blowing, as they come bleating from the yellow fields, by the crimson thread we wound about their necks in April or May, and so undo the gate and let the wanderers in? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The engine has run over parallels of latitude as if they were shadows, but it has done more. It has borne you from summer to winter in a round day. The stain of ripe strawberries is on your fingers, but your fingers are in mittens! We are all fashioned to live a great while in a little while, if we only know how. June and January are nearer together than any other brace of months in all the year. Show us the boy who, when he counts his temporal treasures and thinks of the Fourth of July, does not make a mental dive for his Christmas stocking the next minute! ”

“ But we go carelessly along, and we get a whiff of the violets down there in the grass, and the lilacs over yonder in the yard, and the roses in the fence corner, and they all go to make up the fragrance and the beauty of the day, though we had not been looking for any of them. It is the indirect ray from everything, whether it be the sun or the drop of dew, that unravels and makes visible the beauty of the world. ”

“ One large ripe star used to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's Woods—I loved to fancy it would lodge sometime, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I did for beech-nuts—a star with such a warm and human sort of light, so like an earthly fire-side somewhere, with the door open, that it always inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much among the belongings of that particular landscape as the daisies in the pasture, and not more than a breath or two farther off. ”

“ We are all on tip-toe, and we beg in a breath to be lifted up one by one, and look in the hundredth time upon the tin cases of the weights, and the poor lonely pendulum, which goes to and fro by its little dim window, and never comes out in the world, and our petitions are all granted, and we are lifted up, and we all touch with a finger the wonderful weights, and the music of the little wheel is resumed. ”

“ Now, Lucy is pretty square-cornered mentally, but she comes of a stock on the mother's side somewhat given to dreaming. That mother of hers—she is seventy-six if she is a day—will see as much beauty in the sky and breathe the fragrance of the apple-blossoms with as fresh a pleasure as if the world were only sixteen years old, and world and woman were born twins. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A fortnight ago, John hung his jacket upon the fence, and to-day he shook out from one of the pockets a nest, and two eggs as blue as the sky.
There is singing everywhere: from the tuft of gray grass there comes a small tune of two notes and a rest, then two more; from the second rail of the fence a gush of melody; from the roof-ridge, a solo; from the depths of the air, as of angel calling unto angel. The birds and the buds make it May, and May it shall be. ”

“ The very wheels beneath you trundle along in an indistinct fashion, and the engine has a wheeze instead of a whistle. It is as if the railway dictionary had been run over by the cars a number of times, and there was nothing left for the owners but to serve out the fragments to passengers. The brakeman of a train holds, all things considered, the post of honor, because the post of danger. The locomotive talks to him all day, and, as a rule, that is about the only individual with whom he holds much conversation. ”