"Now, Mrs. Somerton, can you again wonder, as you've wondered aloud to my wife and me, that I, whom you've kindly called a man of high quality, have been content to pass my adult years among these backwoods people? Do see their hearts and souls come into their faces! I know they are not always so, but we never heard of any one remaining all the while on the Mount of Transfiguration. It isn't the railway alone that they're thinking of, but of what it will mean to themselves and their hard-working wives, and to their children,—closer touch with the great world of which they've read and wondered, better prices for their yield, which means more creature comforts at home, better educational facilities for their children, and less temptation for the children to escape from the farm to the city. They know that all this must be the work of time, but they've never before seen the beginning of it, so now they're building air-castles as rapidly as a lot of magicians in dream-land. I can't blame them, for I'm doing it myself, old and cautious though I am. They can wait for the end, so can I; for all of us, out here, have had long training in the art of waiting. At present the beginning is joy enough, for I can't imagine how any one about us could look happier."
The formal survey of the railway route began that afternoon, for the people would listen to no suggestions of delay. It was completed quickly, and that the company was not yet organized according to law did not prevent the immediate offer and acceptance of a large working force of men, boys, horses, etc., from the village itself. The young engineer was his own entire staff, and also temporary secretary and accountant of the enterprise; but as it was his first great job, he enjoyed the irregularity of everything. From that time forward, for several months, the village stores ceased to be lounging places. Any villager or farmer with time to spare made his way to the line of the new road, and feasted his eyes, apparently never to fulness, on the promise of what was to be.
As the work progressed farther from the town, the farmers of the vicinity, with their families, would saunter toward the line on Sunday afternoons and linger for hours, talking of the good times that were coming, and some of them actually moved their houses as near to the track as possible, so that the inmates might be able to have the best possible view of the trains when they began to run. When the road-bed was made and the ties were placed, and the laying of the rails began, entire families picnicked for a day at a time beside the track, although the weather had become cold, merely to see a shabby locomotive push backward some platform cars loaded with rails, and to see the rails unloaded, and listen to the musical clamor of track-laying; for did not each detail of the work bring nearer to them the hope of Claybanks for a third of a century,—a completed railway?
Truett had been better than his word. He had promised to finish the work by Christmas, but the formal opening ceremonies took place on Thanksgiving Day; and more than half the people of the county took part in it. With an eye to business the principal stockholders—the Claybanks merchants—hired a passenger train for the day, and gave the natives free rides to and from the nearest station that had a siding and switch by which the train could be sent back. The station had not a great town to support it,—merely five thousand people,—but as the Claybankers roamed through the place and saw many houses finer than any house in Claybanks, several streets that were paved with wooden blocks and many that had sidewalks, saw the telegraph and telephone wires, and a bank, and a fire-engine house, and horse-troughs into which fresh water flowed steadily from pipes which were part of a general service, their hearts were filled with the conviction that all these comforts and conveniences had come through the possession of a railway. Claybanks was in a fair way to become like unto that town, and they made haste, each after his kind, to rejoice. Then all of them who were farmers began to lay out, on their mental tablets, the appearance of their own farms as they would be when divided into building lots, and also to count the pleasing sums of money that would be paid by the purchasers of the lots, and also the many creature comforts which the money would buy.
The first freight car that left Claybanks for business purposes was loaded with yellowish brown brick for New York, and all Claybanks was present to wave hats, handkerchiefs, hands, and aprons, as it moved slowly off. Claybanks wheat had gone East in times past, so had Claybanks pork, and undoubtedly these products had entered into the physical constitution of New York to some extent, but they could not afterward be identified. Claybanks bricks, however, were very different. They would be seen by every one, and they would make Claybanks literally a part of the metropolis itself.
The meaning of all this was felt by the people of all classes; even Pastor Grateway was so impressed by it that he preached a sermon from the text, "They shall speak with the enemy in the gates," and that there should be no doubt as to who "they" were, a brown brick was at each side of the pulpit for the sides of the open Bible to rest upon. The pastor, being a man of spiritual insight, did not neglect to enlarge upon the fact that the bricks themselves were originally clay—mere earth—that had been trampled underfoot for years, seemingly useless, until it had been conformed in shape and quality to the uses for which it had been designed from the foundation of the world, and that each brick was a reminder that the most insensate lump of human clay had in it the possibilities for which it had been created.
Nevertheless, the majority of the hearers only carried home with them the conviction that the Claybanks brick-yard must become one of the great things of the world—otherwise, why did the minister preach about it?
