The West is full of Athenses that were. They have grown greater and better. They star the prairies as constellations the heavens. They have grown more modest and less pretentious with time. Villages, like girls, have "a hateful age." There is a period, too, in the life of villages, when they resemble that red-nightcapped carpenter, the woodpecker—they are biggest when first hatched.
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 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."
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 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!