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 stingy pipe on a dry prairie. Climbing heavy grades involves hard drinking. On the Mount Washington Railway, where you travel a mile and rise nineteen hundred feet in an hour and half, the thirsty engine disposes of eighteen hundred gallons of water—all dissipated in breath.

During the late war they often watered engines from pails, as they would ponies. Perhaps you have sat upon a bank, not of thyme but of time, at midnight, in Tennessee, with suspicious cedars all about within hailing distance—trees that often shed queer fruit in a vigorous way—waiting for the train-men to bring locomotive refreshments of light wood and pails of water. Never since then has the smoke of an engine been welcome, but often, in those times when the nights were "unruly," would the burning red cedar load the air with a suspicion of sweet incense that was really grateful. Possibly it was associated with the perfume of the cedar bows of boyhood, when the flight of one's own arrow, sped from the springing wood, was grander than any flight of eloquence the archer has heard since. To-day, a whiff of cedar will carry you faster and farther than a swift engine. It will take almost any half-century-old boy back to the era of blue-striped trousers and roundabouts, and girls with white pantalettes gathered at the bottom; to the time when bow and arrow, windmill and kite, jack-knife, fishhooks and tops, "two old cat," Saturday afternoons and training-days were so many letters in the alphabet of happiness, and he will not be a bit worse for the trip, but younger, gentler and more human.

Writing of boys: till the writer was sixteen years old he never saw a deacon, that he couldn't tell him as quick as he could a squirrel. Sometimes they were tall and thin, but often stout, and as the papers have it, "prominent members of society"—measured from the second vest button to the small of the back! But they were always gray, and sometimes venerable. He used to wonder if they were born old, and the idea of a young deacon was impossible. The locomotive has hurried up these useful servants of the church, so that they are sometimes picked before they are quite ripe, and sent forward by an early train. Take a sleek, dark-haired, flare-vested, civet-scented, slim-waisted man in a cut-away, and switching his patent-leathers with a ratan, and you have a deacon that would puzzle Wilderness John, as Agassiz never was puzzled by a new specimen of natural history. But he may be a capital deacon for all that, only in disguise. The more you travel, the less you carry. The novice begins with two trunks, a valise, a hat-box and an umbrella. He jingles with checks. He haunts the baggage-car like a "perturbed spirit." He ends with a small knapsack, an overcoat and a linen duster. Bosom, collar, wristbands, he does himself up in paper like a curl. He is as clean round the edges as the margins of a new book.

We throw away a great deal of baggage on the life journey that we cannot well spare; a young heart, bright recollections of childhood, friends of the years that are gone. And so we "fly light," but we do not fly well.

Let us approach the baggage-man with tenderness. Let us tender him a quarter, if he in turn will give quarter to our trunk. He is square-built and broad-shouldered. His vigorous exercise in throwing things has developed his muscles till he projects like a catapult. It is pleasant to watch his playful ways, provided you carry your baggage in your hat. He waltzes out a great trunk on its corners till they are as dog-eared as a school reader. He keeps carpet-bags in the air like a juggler. While one is going up another is coming down. Hinges of trunks give way. There is a smell of camphor and paregoric, and a jingle of glass, and a display of woman's apparel. They are all bundled up like an armful of fodder, and thrust back into the offending trunk, and a big word is tumbled in after them—to keep things down.

Meanwhile, the tremendous voice of the check-master tolls like a bell, "4689 Cleveland! 271 Rochester!" and the baggage-car is as lively with all sorts of baggage as corn in a corn-popper. Things that are marked, "this side up with care!" come down bottom-side up, like captured mud-turtles. They go end over end, like acrobats. A rope is stretched around the place of destruction, to keep the crowd that is watching the entertainment from being killed. This has always seemed to me a very touching instance of the loving kindness of railway officials, and yet it is possible a spare end of that same rope might be used in a pleasant way to diversify the performances about that baggage-car. They have—I hope he is yet alive—a model baggage-man on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad. He is very feeble. Once he was the champion ground-tumbler of the West, but now he has the galloping consumption. He is a melancholy spectacle, but he is a model of his kind. The baggage moves quietly about him, and yet the transfer is made rapidly and on time. There is only one thing that prevents his promotion—his being made inspector of baggage-men throughout the country, with a commission to travel and visit them all. It is this: quick consumption is not contagious. Not one of his subordinates could possibly catch it.

Sometimes a train in an accountable way has a characteristic. Were you ever passenger on the Inarticulate Train? The conductor enters the car, closes the door with a confused bang, and, his little tongs swinging on a finger in an airy way, he shouts "Tix!" The train-boy coasts along behind him, and he says, "Ap! Pape! Norangz!" The brakeman pops his head in at the door, shows you the top of his cap, and roars down into his manly bosom, "Tledr!" just as you are pulling into that misplaced Castilian city, in the region where, according to the old song,

"Potatoes they grow small in Maumee!"

The very wheels beneath you trundle along in an indistinct fashion, and the engine has a wheeze instead of a whistle. It is as if the railway dictionary had been run over by the cars a number of times, and there was nothing left for the owners but to serve out the fragments to passengers. The brakeman of a train holds, all things considered, the post of honor, because the post of danger. The locomotive talks to him all day, and, as a rule, that is about the only individual with whom he holds much conversation. It says "Hold her!" and round goes the wheel. "Danger!" and he springs to it with a will. "Ease her!" and off comes the brake with a clank. "Now I'm going to start!" "Now I'm going to back!" "Off the track! Off the track!" "Coming to bridge!" "I see the town!" "Open the s-w-i-t-c-h!" and, through all, the brakeman stands by like a helmsman in a storm. On lightning trains he is not given to much humor, but the article is in him. As you cross Iowa by the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, and approach the great Divide, the stations run: East Side—Tip-Top—West Side. The route through that region is a little monotonous. It is the hammer, hammer, hammer of the wheels in anvil cadence hour after hour. Between cat-naps, small enough to be kittens, you see the great swells of prairie, and then more prairie. But there is a brakeman on one of the trains that can enliven you a little, and always brings up a smile like a glimmer of sunshine. He says "East Side!" or "West Side!" stupidly enough, but when the train is just halting at the pinnacle, he throws a hearty elation and a double circumflex into his tone, much as if you had asked him what sort of time he had at the great Railroad Ball, and he cries "Tip-Top!" That inflection of his always tells.

There is a poor joke, past the grace of saltpetre, that an economical conductor will save a few hundred dollars a year more than his salary; and there is an impression abroad in many minds that conductors take to stealing as Dogberry got his reading and writing—naturally. When it comes to that, a couple of railway directors and a president or two have been known to steal more money than all the conductors in the United States together ever misappropriated. A conductor, if dishonest, is not a rogue because he is a conductor, or a conductor because he is a rogue. As a class, conductors are as honorable as lawyers, physicians, bankers, while they run far greater risks, and have far more to try their patience, than the money-changers and professional gentlemen just named. Go from Providence to the Golden Gate, and, as a rule, it is the conductors who treat you with the most courtesy and kindness, step aside from the line of their official duty to gratify your reasonable wishes and render you comfortable. And not for you only, but for the hundreds of thousands of strangers who ride upon their trains.

To them, generations of men and women only live from eighteen to twenty-four hours. They pass on, and are seen no more. But during those hours the conductor has human nature under a microscope. He discovers things about people that they themselves had only guessed at. He discerns traits that their neighbors never detected. The average conductor is a shrewd man. He reads faces like a book, and remembers them always.