ON THE MISTY MOUNTAIN.
ROUTE I.
It was in the by-gone days of the Misty Mountain Stage and Express Company—only a few years ago by actual chronological computation, it is true; but at least a half a century by the change effected in the less than demi-decade which has passed.
Do you know that at times, when I contemplate this change, I can scarcely realize that I have lived long enough to have lived through it? I often feel as if the memory of the things that were is the reflection of experiences in a former state of existence, so different is the what is from the what was. I feel burdened by great personal antiquity, and cannot help considering myself a sort of Methusalem le Petit. I have seen the great plains spanned by the rail and the wire. The smoking, shrieking steed of steam drinks the waters of the fork of the Misty Mountain, sacred but a year or two ago to the pony of the red man. The journey which occupied weeks to accomplish ten years past is now made in a few hours, and lightning whispers are interchanged between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
My good old Uncle Joe, an old-time leather-dealer in the “Swamp” in New York City—who, a bachelor, had adopted me, an orphan, and, having educated me, had assigned me a desk in the dingy old office with the leathery smell—told me one day, without any previous warning, that he wished me to start without delay for the Stony Sierra to look after some of his business interests in that region. That was my Uncle Joe’s way of doing things. His engagements did not permit his leaving New York at the time. Besides, he had crossed the great plains more than twice or thrice, and had had enough of them. But as I had not had any of them, a little, he thought, would do me good, and he proposed to give it me.
My journey to the (then) end of railroad communication was remarkable only for the general railway decadence which, commencing at Chicago, increased “in inverse ratio to the square of the distance from our objective point,” as the elegant English of the telegraph would phrase it. The conductor grew familiar with the passengers, who grew fewer. The various characters of the “newspaper boy,” the vegetable-ivory notion vender, the “ice-cold lemonade” boy, the candy-seller, the cigar boy, the bookseller, the apple and orange boy, were all performed by one and the same protean youngster. The passengers had dwindled so that it would not pay to invest two boys in that dramatic business. At length, the Thespian youth, tired of playing a dozen different characters to empty cars, threw off all his disguises at once, and subsided into a mere passenger like the rest of us.
A sudden shock brought a slight nap in which I was indulging to a timely end. The train had stopped. The pitiful account of passengers were on their feet, some leaving the car, others looking about them with an expression of interrogative imbecility, when the brakeman shouted out:
“Devil’s Landing—end o’ track!”
No danger of taking a wrong train now. So we passengers, four in number, left the car. We concluded a hasty agreement to stick to each other as fellow-men and fellow-passengers, we four waifs washed on the shore of barbarism by the advancing tide of civilization. A fellow-feeling of lost-sheepiness made us wondrous kind to each other.