SKETCHES***


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  [Illustration: THE GREEN TRAVELER,
                [See page 62.]


THE WORLD ON WHEELS AND OTHER SKETCHES

bY

BENJ. F. TAYLOR







Chicago,
S. C. Griggs & Co.
1874

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by
S. C. Griggs & Co.,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

Printed at the Lakeside Press,
Clark and Adams Sts.,
Chicago.




ONLY THIS:

The Wheels in this book ran, during the summer of 1873, through the
columns of THE NEW YORK EXAMINER AND CHRONICLE, to "the head and front
of whose offending," the

    REV. EDWARD BRIGHT, D.D.,

who gave those wheels "the right of way," the old rolling stock and a
miscellaneous cargo is

    CORDIALLY CONSIGNED.




ROLLING STOCK AND BILL OF LADING.


_THE WORLD ON WHEELS._


CHAPTER.                                                         PAGE.

    I. THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT                                        13

   II. THE CONCORD COACH                                           17

  III. THE RAGING CANAL                                            23

   IV. THE IRON AGE                                                30

    V. THE IRON HORSE                                              35

   VI. PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS                                45

  VII. VICIOUS ANIMALS                                             51

 VIII. HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN-MEN                             60

   IX. IN THE SADDLE                                               68

    X. RACING AND PLOWING                                          74

   XI. SNOW BOUND                                                  82

  XII. SCALDED TO DEATH                                            89

 XIII. ALL ABOARD!                                                 94

  XIV. EARLY AND LATE                                             103

   XV. DEAD HEADS                                                 112

  XVI. WORKING "BY THE DAY"                                       118

 XVII. A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER                            123

XVIII. DREAMING ON THE CARS                                       128

  XIX. "MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT"                                     136

   XX. THE MAKER OF CITIES                                        144

  XXI. A CABOOSE RIDE                                             150

 XXII. HATCHING OUT A WOMAN                                       154

XXIII. A FLANK MOVEMENT                                           159

 XXIV. LIGHT AND SHADE                                            162

  XXV. PRECIOUS CARGOES                                           168


_BAGGAGE._

    I. MY STARRY DAYS                                             175

   II. "NO. 104,163"                                              193

  III. OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER                                        206

   IV. OUT-DOOR PREACHING                                         216

    V. THE STORY OF THE BELL                                      223

   VI. "MY EYE!"                                                  226

  VII. THE OLD ROAD                                               241

 VIII. A BIRD HEAVEN                                              251





ILLUSTRATIONS.


THE GREEN TRAVELER                                      _Frontispiece._

THE CONCORD COACH                                                  19

THE BAGGAGE SMASHER                                                63

A LITTLE LATE                                                     110

BAGGAGE                                                           173

SWITCH OFF                                                        258




THE WORLD ON WHEELS.




CHAPTER I.

THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT.


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 happens to be. It is the alphabet of
human ingenuity. You can spell out with the wheel and the lever--and
the latter is only a loose spoke of that same wheel--pretty much
everything in the Nineteenth Century but the Christian Religion and the
Declaration of Independence. Having thought about it a minute more, I
am inclined to except the exceptions, and say they translate the one
and transport the other.

Were you ever a boy? Never? Well, then, my girl, wasn't one of your
first ambitions a finger-ring? And there is your wheel, with a small
live axle in it! But whatever you are, did you ever know a boy worth
naming and owning who did not try to make a wheel out of a shingle, or
a board, or a scrap of tin? Maybe it was as eccentric as a comet's
orbit, and only _wabbled_ when it was meant to whirl, but it was the
genuine curvilinear aspiration for all that. Boys, young and old,
"take to" wheels as naturally as they take to sin. I am sorry for the
fellow that never rigged a water-wheel in the spring swell of the
meadow brook, or mounted a wind-mill on the barn gable, or drew a
wagon of his own make. My sympathies do not extend to his lack of a
velocipede, which is nothing if not a bewitched and besaddled
wheelbarrow.

In fact, it seems to be the tendency of everything to _be_ a wheel.
There's your tumbling dolphin, and there's your whirling world. The
conqueror whose hurry set on fire the axles of his chariot was no
novelty. Who knows that the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis,
lighting up the sky about the polar circles in the night-time, may not
be the flashes from the glowing axles of the planet? Who knows that
the ice and snow may not be piled up about the Arctic and Antarctic
just to keep the flaming gudgeons as cool as possible? Does Sir John
Franklin? Does _any_body?

Take an old man's memory. Only give it a touch, and it turns like a
wheel between his two childhoods, and 1810 comes round before you can
count the spokes, and 1874 hardly out of sight.

When they made narrow wooden hands with slender wrists, and called them
oars, and galleys swept the Eastern seas in a grave and stately way,
they did well. When they fashioned broad and ghastly palms of canvas
that laid hold upon the empty air, and named them sails, they did
better. When they grouped around an axle the iron hands that buffeted
the waves and put the sea, discomfited, rebuked, behind the flying
ship, they had their wheel, and they did best!

A one-horse wagon--for nothing was buggy then, but neglected
bedsteads--artistically bilious, and striped like a beetle, with a
paneled box high before and behind, like an inverted _chapeau_,
and a seat with a baluster back, softened and graced with a buffalo
robe, warm in winter--and in summer also--was one of the wheeled
wonders of my boyhood. No sitting in that wagon like a right-angled
triangle--room in front for any possible length of leg, and a
foot-stove withal--room behind for two or three handfuls of children,
and a little hair-trunk with a bit of brass-nail alphabet on the cover.
Curiously enough, the wagon was owned by that noble Baptist pioneer of
the New York North Woods, Elder--not Reverend but revered--JOHN
BLODGETT, and in it he used to traverse "East road," and "West road,"
and "Number Three road," and go to Denmark and Copenhagen and Leyden
and Turin, and other places in foreign parts, without shipping a sea,
or, to borrow a mors