THE TUNNEL OF TRÜBAU.
Amblers have not more prejudices and superstitions than railroad travellers. All the preferences for the winning places, the lucky pack, the shuffling cut, &c., have their representatives among the prevailing notions of those who “fly by steam.”
“I always sit with my back to the engine,” cries one.
“I always travel as far from the engine as possible,” exclaims another.
“I never trust myself behind the luggage train,” adds a third.
“There ‘s nothing like a middle place,” whispers a fourth: and so on they go; as if, when a collision does come, and the clanking monster has taken an erratic fit, and eschews the beaten path, any precautions or preferences availed in the slightest degree, or that it signified a snort of the steam, whether you were flattened into a pancake, or blown up in the shape of a human soufflé. “The Rail” is no Whig politician, no “bit-by-bit” reformer. When a smash happens, skulls are as fragile as saucers, and bones as brittle as Bohemian glass. The old “fast coach” never killed any one but the timid gentleman that jumped off. To be sure, it always dislocated the coachman’s shoulder; but then, from old habit of being shot out, the bone rolled in again, like a game of cup and ball. The insides and out scraped each other, swore fearful intentions against the proprietors, and some ugly fellow took his action of damages for the loss his prospects sustained by disfigurement. This was the whole extent of the mishap. Not so now, when four hundred souls are dashed frantically together and pelt heads at each other as people throw bonbons at a carnival.
Steam has invented something besides fast travelling; and if it has supplied a new method of getting through the world, it has also suggested about twenty new ways of going out of it. Now, it’s the old story of the down train and the up, both bent on keeping the same line of rails, and courageously resolving to see which is the “better man,” a point which must always remain questionable, as the umpires never survive. Again, it is the engine itself, that, sick of straight lines, catches a fancy for the waving ones of beauty, and sets out, full speed, over a fine grass country, taking the fences as coolly as Allan M’Donough himself, and caring just as little for what “comes behind:” these incidents being occasionally varied by the train taking the sea or taking fire, either of which has its own inconveniences, more likely to be imagined than described.