Here all of a sudden is another man, all alone with some millions of trees and the Alleghanies. And he stands there with an axe in his hands, revolving in that untidy head of his what he shall do next to the old hills and their reverend forest growth. The audacity of it, and the solemnity!
It would be as well perhaps for sentiment if every man was quite alone. For I find that if there are two men together one immediately tries to sell the other something; and to inform him of its nature, he goes and paints the name of his disgusting commodities on the smooth faces of rocks and on tree-trunks. Now, any landscape, however grand, loses in dignity if you see "Bunkum's Patent" inscribed in the foreground in whitewash letters six feet high.
What a mercy it is these quacks cannot advertise on the sky—or on running water!
For the river is now at its grandest and it keeps with us all the afternoon, showing on either side splendid waterways between sloping spurs of the hills densely wooded and strewn with great boulders. But on a sudden the mountains are gone and the river with them, and we speed along through a region of green grass-land and abundant cultivation. Land agents might truthfully advertise it in lots as "eligible sites for kingdoms."
And so on, past townships, whose names running (at forty miles an hour) no man can read, and round the famous "horseshoe curve"—where it looks as if the train were trying to get its head round in order to swallow its tail—down into valleys already taking their evening tints of misty purple, and pink, and pale blue. And then Derry.
Just before we arrived there, two freight trains had selected Derry as an opportune spot for a collision, and had collided accordingly. There could have been very little reservation about their collision, for the wreck was complete, and when we got under way again we could just make out by the moonlight the scattered limbs of carriages lying heaped about on the bank. In some places it looked as if a clumsy apprentice had been trying to make packing-cases out of freight wagons, but had given up on finding that he had broken the pieces too small. And they were too big for matches. So it was rather a useless sort of collision, after all—and no one was hurt.
But "the Pennsylvania Limited" has very little leisure to think about other people's collisions, and so we were soon on our way again through the moonlit country, with the hills in the distance lying still and black, like round-backed monsters sleeping, and the stations going by in sudden snatches of lamplight, and every now and then a train, its bell giving a wail exactly like the sound of a shell as it passes over the trenches. And so to Pittsburg, and, our "five minutes" over, the train stole away like a hyena, snarling and hiccoughing, and we were again out in the country, with everything about us beautified by the gracious alchemy of the moonlight and the stars.
And the Ohio River rolled alongside, with its steamers ploughing up furrows of ghostly white froth, and unwinding as they went long streamers of ghostly black—and then I fell asleep.
When I awoke next morning I was in Indiana, and very sunny it looked without a hill in sight to make a shadow. The water stood in lakes on the dead level of the country, and horses, cattle, sheep, and here and there a pig—a pregustation of Chicago—grazed and rooted, very well satisfied apparently with pastures that had no ups and downs to trouble them as they loitered about. And as the morning wore on, the people woke up, and were soon as busy as their windmills. In the fields the teams were ploughing; in the towns, the children were trooping off to school. But the eternal level began at last, apparently, to weary the Pennsylvania Limited, for it commenced slackening speed and finding frivolous pretexts for coming nearly to a standstill—the climax being reached when we halted in front of a small, piebald pig. We looked at the pig and the pig looked at us, and the pig got the best of it, for we sneaked off, leaving the porker master of the situation and still looking.
But these great flats—what a paradise of snipe they are, and how golf-players might revel on them! Birds were abundant. Crows went about in bands recruiting "black marauders" in every copse; blackbirds flew over in flocks, and small things of the linnet kind rose in wisps from the sedges and osiers. And there was another bird of which I did not then know the name, that was a surprise every time it left the ground, for it sate all black and flew half scarlet. Could not these marsh levels be utilized for the Indian water-nut, the singhara? In Asia where it is cultivated it ranks almost as a local staple of food, and is delicious.