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 pounding away to Iowa, burdened with Michigan forests that sawmills have laughed over in their rough, coarse way. It is called lumber, but it is a county capital, a whole village, a happy home. Score out with the double bars of the railroad a broad page of the open book of the fertile wilderness, sink a well somewhere that the engine can halt to drink, and a shanty, weather-beaten as a wasp's nest, will come down in a few days over the roll of the prairie, and treat itself to some new clap-boards and a coat of paint white as a sepulchre, and there it will stand close beside the track to see the cars go by.

Soon, another will creep up from the bushy run and range itself alongside, and ten to one that it will shout at you in monstrous pica lettered along its whole front, Metropolitan Hotel! You have always observed that the smaller the inn the bigger the title, much after the fashion of the naturalists who "call names," and denominate a harmless little chimney-swallow an Hirundo Pelasgia! Then more houses, a church with a chuckle-headed belfry, a school-house, a store, all white as this week's washing. Then one money-purse of a mail-bag will be thrown off from a passing train upon the depot platform, and another handed on as easily as a woman's work-pocket.

The village is christened Athens, it has a P.M., and when a little village grows to have a P.M., it is getting pretty well along towards A.M. Day has fairly broke. Untilled breadths of prairie round about begin to show scars. The plow is busy. They set out trees, and settle a minister and hire a schoolma'am. They fit up a hall over a store, and call it Apollo. A man comes along with a composing-stick in his pocket and starts a newspaper. It is the Clarion. The editor thanks one man for a pumpkin and measures it. He confesses to a turkey and acknowledges the corn. He says he is amazed at the great West. A young lawyer gets off the cars, and immediately another. A solitary lawyer is useless. What would Robinson Crusoe have done had he been an attorney? His story would have been brief, and no red tape to tie it with. No, a couple of lawyers are like two halves of a pair of shears. You need them both for the cutting purposes of the legal instrument. Two doctors are there already. Then an artist arrives with his house on wheels, and backs it upon a vacant lot next to the "Metropolitan," and there it is, with a monstrous lobster-like eye in the top, and the girls and their "fellows" come in from around about to be taken—come in their best; great healthy girls, wearing three or four dresses apiece, each shorter than the other, and all flounced, or fluted, or something.

The railway has brought the fashions. It also brought that Chinese abomination, a gong. The "Metropolitan" has one, and it frightened an innocent man into running away with a span of horses, and they never got him. It also threw a feeble woman into convulsions who had been reading Gordon's Adventures in Africa—not the "lord" of that ilk. She either thought it was a lion or she was in Africa, but she never explained. The rival hotel, called "The Orient," because it is located in the Occident, and completed yesterday, has not attained to gongs. It only rings a bell.

A barber arrives. His fathers, some of them, were from the coast of Guinea. He is table-waiter at the Metropolitan. Likewise an artist on leather, with dramatic tendencies, for he strikes an attitude and cries, "What boots it!" and then laughs like a general alarm in a poultry-yard. He is ostler at the Metropolitan, also porter. He punishes a fiddle for the dancers at the Apollo. He shaves.

The Methodists came first. They have a choir with a pitch-pipe to it. Next the Baptists, with a melodeon. They both will try for an organ next year. The Examiner has a club bigger than can be cut anywhere within four miles of Athens.

And this Athens is as much the product of the locomotive as a puff of steam. It made things possible. The next thing the prince of modern genii does, is to bolt the track without tumbling into the ditch. It goes across-lots to some sleepy little ante-railroad Corners, that was the county-seat aforetime, and trails the Court-house, by a figure of speech, back to Athens, and it becomes the Capital! All the boys are aching to do something whereby they may get into the new jail. At last the Sheriff catches a rogue and locks him up, and the boys are satisfied. The thin lawyer with the thin tin sign becomes Judge, and also fatter. It was a graveyard they had over at the Corners, a straggling place where people lay down wherever they pleased, and nobody said a word. Things are not thus in Athens. They have laid out a—cemetery, with some pretension to beauty, and have traced it off with paths and avenues like the lines upon the palm of a hand. They also have a hearse. So has the Corners, but then Athens has plumes, when people die that can afford it.

There are a briskness of step and a precision of speech about the people of a railway creation that you never find in a town that is only accessible to a stage-driver, and where they go sauntering about like a Connecticut one-horse chaise. There it is always three o'clock till it is four. In Athens never. From the depot with its time-table to the dusky factotum of the "Metropolitan," everybody carries a watch. He compares it with the standard at the depot once a day. He consults it upon all possible occasions. If you begin to preach, he times you from the text. If you marry him to somebody, he whips out his repeater, and sees just how long you were about it. The second-hand, so useless in a lazy old town, is magnified in importance to a crowbar. You ask him the time, and he tells you "Number Six, due here at two o'clock and one minute, has just gone. I'm thirty seconds slow. It's two o'clock and four minutes!" And there you have the time almost accurate enough for an astronomer. The locomotive is an accomplished educator. It teaches everybody that virtue of princes we call punctuality. It waits for nobody. It demonstrates what a useful creature a minute is in the economy of things.

The West is full of Athenses that were. They have grown greater and better. They star the prairies as constellations the heavens. They have grown more modest and less pretentious with time. Villages, like girls, have "a hateful age." There is a period, too, in the life of villages, when they resemble that red-nightcapped carpenter, the woodpecker—they are biggest when first hatched.