Dean Ramsay in his Reminiscences remarks:—“Some curious stories are told of ladies of this class, as connected with the novelties and excitement of railway travelling. Missing their luggage, or finding that something has gone wrong about it, often causing very terrible distress, and might be amusing, were it not to the sufferer so severe a calamity. I was much entertained with the earnestness of this feeling, and the expression of it from an old Scottish lady, whose box was not forthcoming at the station where she was to stop. When urged to be patient, her indignant exclamation was, “I can bear ony pairtings that may be ca’ed for in God’s providence; but I canna stan’ pairtin’ frae ma claes.”
RAILWAY MANNERS.
A gentleman was travelling by rail from Breslau to Oppeln and found himself alone with a lady in a second-class compartment. He vainly endeavoured to enter into conversation with the other occupant of the carriage; her answers were invariably curt and snappish. Baffled in his attempts, he proceeded to light a cigar to while away the time. Then the lady said to him: “I suppose you have never travelled second-class before, else you would know better manners.” Her travelling companion quietly rejoined: “It is true, I have hitherto only studied the manners of the first and third-classes. In the first-class the passengers are rude to the porters, in the third-class the porters are rude to the passengers. I now discover that in the second-class the passengers are rude to each other.”
A BRAVE GIRL.
Kate Shelley, to whom the Iowa Legislature has just given a gold medal and $200, is fifteen years old. She lives near Des Moines, at a point where a railroad crosses a gorge at a great height. One night during a furious storm the bridge was carried away. The first the Shelleys knew of it was when they saw the headlight of a locomotive flash down into the chasm. Kate climbed to the remains of the bridge with great difficulty, using an improvised lantern. The engineer’s voice answered her calls, but she could do nothing for him, and he was drowned. As an express train was almost due, she then started for the nearest station, a mile distant. A long, high bridge over the Des Moines River had to be crossed on the ties—a perilous thing in stormy darkness. Kate’s light was blown out, and the wind was so violent that she could not stand, so she crawled across the bridge, from timber to timber, on her hands and knees. She got to the station exhausted, but in time to give the warning, though she fainted immediately.
—Detroit Free Press, May 13th, 1882.
SHUT UP IN A LARGE BOX.
The Merv correspondent of the Daily News in a letter dated the 30th of April, 1881, remarks, “I was very much amused by the description given me by some Tekkés of the Serdar’s departure for Russia. It seems that my informants accompanied him up to the point where the trans-Caspian railway is in working order. ‘They shut Tockmé Serdar and two others in a large box (sanduk) and locked him in, and then dragged him away across the Sahara. And,’ added the speakers, ‘Allah only knows what will happen to them inside that box.’ The box, I need hardly say, was a railway carriage.”
AWFUL DEATH ON A RAILROAD BRIDGE.
A man commonly known as “Billy” Cooper, of the town of Van Etten, was walking on the railroad track at a point not far distant from his home. In crossing the railroad bridge he made a miss-step, and, slipping, fell between the ties, but his position was so cramped that he was unable to