The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches

There are some stars to which, in my boyhood, I was wont to lay special claim. Perhaps everybody is. I never thought of their being out of the jurisdiction of the State of New Y...

That sounds like slang, and I have quoted it lest somebody should think it original; but then there is really no more slang in it, as I apply it, than there is in Agur's prayer-...

"The great Mercantile Library Enterprise of San Francisco," so I read in my evening paper, "will positively distribute its prizes on the 31st of October. Tickets, five dollars i...

Does any theological reason exist why there should not be in some blessed planet or other a Bird Heaven, a realm where the green gates of Spring are forever opening and the frui...

"I find the marks of my shortest steps beside those of my beloved mother, which were measured by my own," says Dumas, and so conjures up one of the sweetest images in the world....

The world had to wait a weary time for its wheels, simply because the successors of Tubal and Jubal took something for granted. It is never safe, as every day's experience prove...

In almost every old neighborhood there is an old road, disused and half forgotten, and we like to get away from the traveled thoroughfare, and wander, in a summer's day, along i...

A great many animals get on board first-class passenger trains that should have been shipped in box-cars, with sliding doors on the sides. There is Your Railway Hog--the man who...

A train on the Chicago & Northwestern Road bound for California--a long, full train--a small world on wheels. Everybody's double is aboard. The first twenty-four hours settles t...

Swift motion is the passion of the age. See a picture, see a statue, see a poem, the question _is_, How long did it take to do it? The press that does an old-fashioned month's w...

Two rates of motion are racing and plowing, but, as you shall see, wonderfully alike. An Agricultural Fair has come to mean a Race-Track with a variety of vegetables ranged arou...

When a man travels, what material baggage he takes is _im_material, but he leaves behind him a great deal of mental and moral _impedimenta_. There used to be a saying among the...

There were two steamers on Lake Erie that were twins. They were, in their time, and not so long ago, models of steamboat architecture; elegant as palaces, and in every respect a...

A locomotive has two habits. It drinks and it smokes. It seems to take comfort in drinking at a liberal river, rather than where the draught is trickled out to it through a stin...

The law of association is a queer piece of legislation. There is the bit of road that used to extend from Toledo, where it connected with the steamer, stage and canal packet, to...

Leafless, indeed, stand the great woods, and shivering in the cold North wind. The joints of rheumatic oaks creak dismally, and there is a moan in the maples. The skeleton orcha...

The world has certainly grown. Putting the period just in time, the statement is a safe one--"has certainly grown." When De Witt Clinton developed the Dutch idea in America, and...

They have discovered that our next-door neighbor, the moon, is about the temperature of boiling water. What a splendid locomotive was spoiled just to make a moon! Those of us wh...

The engineer and the brakeman are as often and as truly heroes as the average veteran army colonel under fire for the tenth time. True courage, thoughtful kindness, presence of...

Fifty miles north of Utica, New York, as the crow flies, there is a village. What there was of it in the old days lay in the bottom of a bay of land bounded on the north, south,...

The saddest train upon which the writer ever took passage was the Hospital Train, with its maimed and mangled burden, that ran from the still, white tents of Stevenson, Ala., to...

No matter how carefully you freight a train, there is always something gets on board that never appears on the bill of lading. Day after day you see Alexandrine caravans poundin...

"D. H." Everybody knows what D. H. is. He sees it on the telegram that costs him nothing. He sees it in the glass when he looks at himself, if he rides free upon the train--Dead...

The richest cargo in the world is a cargo of TIME, and the locomotive was made to draw it. Yesterday I saw a man who tugged his household goods and gods from East to West in thi...

When the necromancer turns farmer, sows a few kernels of wheat in a little tin-box of earth, claps on the cover, sends a few sparks of electricity through it, whips off the lid...

Something is written elsewhere of the graveyard luncheons they took in the Sunday noonings. Those were the times when the minister worked by the day. The Sunday school in the mo...

They tarried longer by the way in those days, and they _lived_ longer, most of them. I think, too, they knew each other better, possibly loved each other more, when they went si...

The Railroad is a slanderer. It maligns cities. With few exceptions it _sneaks_ into town; enters it by the cheapest end, as politicians say of candidates, the most "available"...

Steam has ruined a great many things for us, and spoiled much poetry that was good and true in its time. The songs of the fireside to myriads are dead songs. What do they know a...

The perpetual lever called a wheel is the masterpiece of mechanical skill. At home on sea and land, like the feet of the Proclaiming Angel, it finds a fulcrum wherever it happen...

Has it ever happened to you to be left somewhere, and nothing to get away upon but a freight train? And did the train happen to be running on an Express train's time, and did yo...

In war and peace all people are afraid of a flank movement. General Sherman, though he never quite found out what newspapers are for, _did_ discover that the Federal strength wa...

The Roman knight who rode, all accoutred as he was, into the gulf, and the mouth of the hungry Forum closed upon him and was satisfied, vanquished, in his own dying, that great...