The children were crying for joy. I confess I don’t very often pray, but I did then and there. I kneeled down by the side of that good old woman, and offered up thanks to an All Wise Being for our safe deliverance from a most terrible death, and called down blessings without number upon that good old woman and her children. Near by stood the engineer, fireman, and brakesmen, the tears streaming down their bronzed cheeks.
I immediately prevailed upon Mrs. Graff and the children to go back into the cars out of the storm and cold. After reaching the cars I related our hair-breadth escape, and to whom we were indebted for our lives, and begged the men passengers to go forward and see for themselves. They needed no further urging, and a great many of the ladies went also, regardless of the storm. They soon returned, and their pale faces gave full evidence of the frightful death we had escaped. The ladies and gentlemen vied with each other in their thanks and heartfelt gratitude towards Mrs. Graff and her children, and assured her that they would never, never forget her, and before the widow left the train she was presented with a purse of four hundred and sixty dollars, the voluntary offering of a whole train of grateful passengers. She refused the proffered gift for some time, and said she had only done her duty, and the knowledge of having done so was all the reward she asked. However, she finally accepted the money, and said it should go to educate her children.
The railway company built her a new house, gave her and her children a life pass over the road, and ordered all trains to stop and let her get off at home when she wished, but the employés needed no such orders, they can appreciate all such kindness—more so than the directors themselves.
The old lady frequently visits my home at H— and she is at all times a welcome visitor at my fireside. Two of the children are attending school at the same place.
—Appleton’s American Railway Anecdote Book.
A COUNTY COURT JUDGE’S FEELING AGAINST RAILWAYS.
In a County Court case at Carlisle, reported in the Carlisle Journal, of October 31st, 1851, the judge (J. K. Knowles, Esq.) is represented to have said:—“You may depend upon it, if
I could do anything for you, I would, for I detest all railways. If they get a verdict in this case it will be the first, and I hope it will be the last.”
RAILWAY TICKETS.
A writer in that valuable miscellany Household Words, remarks:—“About thirteen years ago, a Quaker was walking in a field in Northumberland, when a thought struck him. The man who was walking was named Thomas Edmonson. He had been, though a Friend, not a very successful man in life. He was a man of integrity and honour, as he afterwards abundantly proved, but he had been a bankrupt, and was maintaining himself as a clerk at a small station on the Newcastle and Carlisle line. In the course of his duties in this situation, he found it irksome to have to write on every railway ticket that he delivered. He saw the clumsiness of the method of tearing the bit of paper off the printed sheet as it was wanted, and filling it up with pen and ink. He perceived how much time, trouble, and error might be saved by the process being done in a mechanical way; and it was when he set his foot down on a particular spot on the before mentioned field that the idea struck him how all that he wished might be done by a machine—how tickets might be printed with the names of stations, the class of carriage, the dates of the month, and all of them from end to end of the kingdom, on one uniform system. Most inventors accomplish their great deeds by degrees—one thought suggesting another from time to time; but, when Thomas Edmonson showed his family the spot in the field where his invention occurred to him, he used to say that it came to his mind complete, in its whole scope and all its details. Out of it has grown the mighty institution of the Railway Clearing House; and with it the grand organization by which the Railways of the United Kingdom act, in regard to the convenience of individuals, as a unity. We may see at a glance the difference to every one of us of the present organized system—by which we can take our tickets from almost any place to another, and get into a carriage on almost any of our great lines, to be conveyed without further care to the opposite end of the kingdom—