Читать книгу The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches - Benjamin F. Taylor - Страница 6

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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 graveyard. The world has certainly grown. These sketches are written at a place in the State of New York known on the old maps as Chadwick's Bay. It is flanked by one of the loveliest villages in all the empire. To that village came the late Rev. Dr. Elisha Tucker, whose memory is yet fragrant in the churches—then neither Reverend nor Doctor, but the plain and primitive Elder Tucker—came with his young wife, who went a thousand miles alone, a while ago, to visit friends!—came from Buffalo forty miles along the Lake shore to that lovely village in a one-horse wagon, and took up his life work. There was not a Baptist church west of him. He preached the first sermon anybody ever heard in Cleveland. A schooner with rusty sails came sliding into Chadwick's Bay with his small store of household wealth. The painted Senecas and the smoky Onondagas went gliding about like vanishing shadows. Deer trooped across the landscapes like flocks of sheep. Speckled trout—nature's great piscatorial triumph, if they didn't weigh but a pound apiece—spotted with carmine and gold, leaped out of the cold brooks into the sunshine. There is a roll of dull thunder day and night within ear-shot of where I write these lines at Chadwick's Bay. Twenty-five hundred cars rumble by every twenty-four hours. Flocks and herds from a thousand hills and plains roll along on iron casters like pieces of heavy cabinet-work. Broad harvests trundle Eastward to tide-water. They rattle over the lines of longitude, and set them together in their flight like the stripes on the American flag.

It is the World on Wheels.

The story of the Locomotive is the history of mechanical invention. It is, if you please, the monogram of the right-hand cunning of mankind. In its finished state, standing upon the track as it does to-day, in its burnished bravery of steel and brass, its shining arms thrust into the caskets slung lightly at its sides, ready at an instant's notice to pluck out great handfuls of power and toss them in fleecy volumes along the way—I want Job to take a look and tell us all about it. He that so described a horse of flesh and blood that Landseer could have painted the creature if he had never seen one, must be able to handle the Locomotive without gloves. Job would have been the man for the job.

Did you ever tell anybody that the Locomotive is a familiar acquaintance of yours—that you are on speaking terms with it? If you never did, then never do, for it will strain your listener's credulity and your credibility fearfully. I have a sort of touch-the-brim-of-the-hat respect for the thing, and am never so busy that I cannot give it a civil look as it goes by. The dull prose strikes into a quickstep as I think about it:

Would ye know the grand Song that shall sing out the age—

That shall flow down the world as the lines down the page—

That shall break through the zones like a North and South river,

From winter to spring making music forever?

I heard its first tones by an old-fashioned hearth,

'Twas an anthem's faint cry on the brink of its birth!

'Twas the tea-kettle's drowsy and droning refrain,

As it sang through its nose as it swung from the crane.

Twas a being begun and awaiting its brains—

To be saddled and bridled and given the reins.

Now its lungs are of steel and its breathings of fire,

And it craunches the miles with an iron desire,

Its white cloud of a mane like a banner unfurled,

It howls through the hills and it pants round the world!

It furrows the forest and lashes the flood,

And hovers the miles like a partridge's brood.

Oh! stand ye to-day in the door of the heart,

With its nerve raveled out floating free on the air,

And feeling its way with ethereal art

By the flash of the Telegraph everywhere,

And then think, if you can, of a mission more grand

Than a mission to LIVE in this time and this land;

Round the World for a sweetheart an arm you can wind,

And your lips to the ear of listening Mankind!

There used to be a question and answer in the old manuals of Chemistry that shut together like a pair of scissors: "What are the precious metals? Gold and silver." How will it do to amend and let the mouthful of catechism run thus: "What are the precious metals? Iron and brass." Iron for wheels, and brass for people! That is better because it is truer. Whoever is curious to know how the name of a certain alloy of copper and zinc came to take in a mental and moral quality as a third ingredient, need only post himself a little in insular literature. The rich ore of the copper mines of Cyprus was called Cyprian brass. Venus was the chief divinity of the Cyprian people's adoration. Queerly enough, their quality struck into their mines like a thunderbolt, and the name of the hard, glittering, resounding metal came to have a meaning that could not possibly pertain to a well-behaved pair of brass and irons. Brass in the face is a good thing in a wrong place, but besides making a capital bearing for a rail-car axle, a little in a man's purposes, as the world goes, is not so very bad an alloy after all. It may make them last longer, if nothing more.