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 thirty days. To be sure, the roads had three dimensions, length, breadth and—thickness;—who ever knew a migrant to flit in pleasant weather?—but he drove early and late, and tired out the family dog and took him aboard—the dog that had developed his muscles in digging out woodchucks and shaking pole-cats to pieces in the Catskills. He has made that journey since in thirty hours, and his account between the old time and the new stands 1:24—a pretty formidable balance when the commodity is a thing so precious as time.

Take that piece of animated nature called the commercial traveler, who slings his little knapsack under his left shoulder-blade and says, "the world is mine oyster!" He is as much a product of the locomotive as a puff of steam. He is a wholesale store in a pair of boots. The great house in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, is trundled about the world by sample, and he girds up his loins and keeps it company. The engine has made him possible. He is about as wonderful as the Arabian Genius that came out of the little bottle and clouded all the land. Let us say he travels fifteen thousand miles a year; that he keeps upon the track ten years without breaking his neck; that he begins his commercial raids at the age of twenty-two, unships his little knapsack, buys out the wholesale house he "represented," and retires from the road at thirty-two, thus making a beginning so noble that it fairly laps over upon the ending.

Now, could you set back his almanac for him about a generation, a couple of hundred years would be little enough to accomplish the work, and he must bequeath the unfinished business to his great-grandson—a legacy from his dead and gone ancestor. Here he is now, with the work done, all the silver on his dining-table, and not a thread of it in his hair! Those witches and wizards of locomotives have drawn a cargo of more than two centuries about the world for him, upon which he could draw at will, and his draft was honored every time. They have made his days "long in the land," no matter what he thought of his father; made a young Methuselah of him, two hundred and fifty years old if a day, and the grasshopper not a grain heavier.

The modern cars have taken aboard what was little thought of in the early history of locomotives—breathing material. Ventilation has by no means attained perfection, but remember the low, narrow boxes, almost as close as mortality's "long home," that they used to call coaches, in which people made sardines of themselves, and caught colds and influenzas and asthmas and catarrhs and other musical instruments, and you will not feel like being very querulous over the discomforts of modern locomotion. That ancient fashion—it was the best the stupid old world knew—of boxing a man up in cars full of nitrogen, was an abomination to chemistry and comfort. A stove in the center, a sort of altar for the rendering of unseemly offerings that Sir Walter Raleigh is said to be answerable for, used to form a torrid zone about eight feet broad, subdued into a pair of temperates, and eked out at the ends with a couple of frigids, and there you have the climate of the old railroads. Then, what with those who broke fast on bolognas and the blessed vegetable that used to keep the girls of Weathersfield a-crying, you had all the odors of Cologne except cologne.

Did you ever watch a kitten under a receiver when the air-pump began to rob her of her breathing material?—the signs of distress, the furry sides working like a busy bellows, the bewildered looking about for help? If it was a talented kitten, perhaps she discovered the fatal orifice in the brazen floor whence her life was escaping, and clapped her paw upon it, as cats have done before now, and so stopped the robbery and won respect and saved her life. This time the victim is not a cat but a king, to-wit, one of the American sovereigns, secured in an old-time car, with nothing aboard to make breath of. It is curious to see how he degenerates by a series of melancholy transitions into a miserable vegetable. You put him into the car brisk and bright as nature will let him be. The sixth hour he grows irritable; the tenth, dull. His fancy leaves him in the fifteenth. He begins to think how far it is to dinner, and how much he will eat, for he is just passing through the brute region, on his way from humanity down to vegetation, where his epitaph might be, "gone to grass." The eighteenth hour he is surly; the twentieth, dumb. The twenty-fourth "does" for him and the metamorphosis is complete, the necromantic experiment is over. He cannot remember who wrote Milton's "Paradise Lost." He forgets the name of the principal character in Hamlet. He runs up a few rounds of the multiplication table just to see if they are all there. He ceases to think at all, looks steadily out of the window and sees nothing. He ceases to count anything in the census. He is not so much as Nebuchadnezzar. He is grass.

But "all things have become new." What speed in the engine; what priceless cargoes of time and oxygen upon the train; how fast and long we live in a little while! Let us be glad. Uneasy people sometimes wish they had been born in the days of Alexander, or Moses, or Methuselah, or somebody who looms up gigantically in the mists of history. It is better to live in the days of the Steam-engine. It has conquered more worlds than Alexander, traversed vaster wildernesses than the Israelite, and reclaimed them as it went; and behold, by the power of the Engine we live to be hundreds of years old, and never give it a thought!

Studying life on the railroad train and looking into a kaleidoscope are somewhat alike. You cannot exhaust the figures in the one, and almost every turn of the wheels brings up a new and curious combination in the other. And so I find myself wondering why I omitted this, forgot that, and ever thought I could possibly be content with the few chance glimpses at thirty miles an hour that are here recorded.

The Engineer has rung the bell, the Conductor has pulled the cord, the Passenger Train has gone. There is nothing now to be done except to ship by a dull freight train a little heavy

BAGGAGE