We used to hear one genuine word of old English in those seafaring days. Perhaps some other ambitious "liner" was pulling out ahead of us. You confer with the "drive" as to the chance of passing it. You offer him a shilling to try, and his under jaw drops like the lower half of a bellows. But promise him a "scale"—scale, skilling, shilling—and he gets all the tough pull out of his tandem that there is in it, and goes by if he can. Websterian "probabilities" says that is not the derivation of "scale" at all, but no matter. So you see, we went to sea without leaving shore. Now and then a cigar-shaped packet, fuller of windows on the sides than ever a German flute was of finger-holes, would pass us with a swash and the blast of a bugle to "open lock," and the three horses at a swinging trot, the deck crowded with passengers, and the cook in the kitchen stewing and frying and roasting himself and the dinner in the same kettles.
It was the aristocrat of canal craft, the packet was, the captain was somebody, and wore gloves, and when on my voyage I saw one coming, I went down into the cabin, red as to my ears, for something I had forgotten, and that I never found in time to come out of the egg till the packet had gone by. It has since occurred to me that possibly the redness of ears at that time might not have been a quality so remarkable as their length. How you would like the snuggery of the cabin now, and the shelf of a berth that you couldn't turn over in if a heavy fellow happened to be sagging on the shelf above you, and the canal-banks even with the top of your head when you sit down, and the sun about as hot upon the roof as if he had actually taken a deck passage and come bodily aboard, is not a matter of doubt. But the memory of that voyage is pleasant, after all—after all what? all these years; like the music of Caryl, "pleasant but mournful to the soul." And should this short story of a long voyage bring back to any reader some such journey that he took in the years that are gone, some cheerful hours he spent, some cherished friends he made, some faces he learned to love, that for him shall never be changed nor sent away, then these paragraphs are not vain.
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 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,