Across the Plains E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: stevenson.jpg
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 308

Beschreibung

Travelogue and essays. According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."

Leseprobe

ACROSS THE PLAINS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

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I.    Across The Plains

II.   The Old Pacific Capital

III.  Fontainebleau

IV.   Epilogue to "An Inland Voyage"

V.    Random Memories

VI.   Random Memories Continued

VII.  The Lantern-bearers

VIII. A Chapter on Dreams

IX.   Beggars

X.    Letter to a Young Gentleman

XI.   Pulvis et Umbra

XII.  A Christmas Sermon

CHAPTER I - ACROSS THE PLAINS

LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN

FRANCISCO

MONDAY. - It was, if I remember rightly, five o'clock when we were  all signalled to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad.  An  emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night,  another on the Sunday morning, our own on Sunday afternoon, a  fourth early on Monday; and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday  a great part of the passengers from these four ships was  concentrated on the train by which I was to travel.  There was a  babel of bewildered men, women, and children.  The wretched little  booking-office, and the baggage-room, which was not much larger,  were crowded thick with emigrants, and were heavy and rank with the  atmosphere of dripping clothes.  Open carts full of bedding stood  by the half-hour in the rain.  The officials loaded each other with  recriminations.  A bearded, mildewed little man, whom I take to  have been an emigrant agent, was all over the place, his mouth full  of brimstone, blustering and interfering.  It was plain that the  whole system, if system there was, had utterly broken down under  the strain of so many passengers.

My own ticket was given me at once, and an oldish man, who  preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil, got my baggage  registered, and counselled me to stay quietly where I was till he  should give me the word to move.  I had taken along with me a small  valise, a knapsack, which I carried on my shoulders, and in the bag  of my railway rug the whole of BANCROFT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED  STATES, in six fat volumes.  It was as much as I could carry with  convenience even for short distances, but it insured me plenty of  clothing, and the valise was at that moment, and often after,  useful for a stool.  I am sure I sat for an hour in the baggage- room, and wretched enough it was; yet, when at last the word was  passed to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way, it was  only to exchange discomfort for downright misery and danger.

I followed the porters into a long shed reaching downhill from West  Street to the river.  It was dark, the wind blew clean through it  from end to end; and here I found a great block of passengers and  baggage, hundreds of one and tons of the other.  I feel I shall  have a difficulty to make myself believed; and certainly the scene  must have been exceptional, for it was too dangerous for daily  repetition.  It was a tight jam; there was no fair way through the  mingled mass of brute and living obstruction.  Into the upper  skirts of the crowd porters, infuriated by hurry and overwork,  clove their way with shouts.  I may say that we stood like sheep,  and that the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep- dogs; and I believe these men were no longer answerable for their  acts.  It mattered not what they were carrying, they drove straight  into the press, and when they could get no farther, blindly  discharged their barrowful.  With my own hand, for instance, I  saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee, she  sitting on a box; and since I heard of no accident, I must suppose  that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the  evening.  It will give some idea of the state of mind to which we  were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother  of the child paid the least attention to my act.  It was not till  some time after that I understood what I had done myself, for to  ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident of  human life.  Cold, wet, clamour, dead opposition to progress, such  as one encounters in an evil dream, had utterly daunted the  spirits.  We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the  conditions of the world.  For my part, I shivered a little, and my  back ached wearily; but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear,  and all the activities of my nature had become tributary to one  massive sensation of discomfort.

At length, and after how long an interval I hesitate to guess, the  crowd began to move, heavily straining through itself.  About the  same time some lamps were lighted, and threw a sudden flare over  the shed.  We were being filtered out into the river boat for  Jersey City.  You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded,  through the dense, choking crush, every one overladen with packages  or children, and yet under the necessity of fishing out his ticket  by the way; but it ended at length for me, and I found myself on  deck under a flimsy awning and with a trifle of elbow-room to  stretch and breathe in.  This was on the starboard; for the bulk of  the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side, by which we had  entered.  In vain the seamen shouted to them to move on, and  threatened them with shipwreck.  These poor people were under a  spell of stupor, and did not stir a foot.  It rained as heavily as  ever, but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls, not  without danger to a boat so badly ballasted as ours; and we crept  over the river in the darkness, trailing one paddle in the water  like a wounded duck, and passed ever and again by huge, illuminated  steamers running many knots, and heralding their approach by  strains of music.  The contrast between these pleasure embarkations  and our own grim vessel, with her list to port and her freight of  wet and silent emigrants, was of that glaring description which we  count too obvious for the purposes of art.

The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.  I had a fixed  sense of calamity, and to judge by conduct, the same persuasion was  common to us all.  A panic selfishness, like that produced by fear,  presided over the disorder of our landing.  People pushed, and  elbowed, and ran, their families following how they could.   Children fell, and were picked up to be rewarded by a blow.  One  child, who had lost her parents, screamed steadily and with  increasing shrillness, as though verging towards a fit; an official  kept her by him, but no one else seemed so much as to remark her  distress; and I am ashamed to say that I ran among the rest.  I was  so weary that I had twice to make a halt and set down my bundles in  the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station,  so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.  There  was no waiting-room, no refreshment room; the cars were locked; and  for at least another hour, or so it seemed, we had to camp upon the  draughty, gaslit platform.  I sat on my valise, too crushed to  observe my neighbours; but as they were all cold, and wet, and  weary, and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement to which we  had been subjected, I believe they can have been no happier than  myself.  I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy, for oranges and  nuts were the only refection to be had.  As only two of them had  even a pretence of juice, I threw the other four under the cars,  and beheld, as in a dream, grown people and children groping on the  track after my leavings.

At last we were admitted into the cars, utterly dejected, and far  from dry.  For my own part, I got out a clothes-brush, and brushed  my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my  blood into the bargain; but no one else, except my next neighbour  to whom I lent the brush, appeared to take the least precaution.   As they were, they composed themselves to sleep.  I had seen the  lights of Philadelphia, and been twice ordered to change carriages  and twice countermanded, before I allowed myself to follow their  example.

TUESDAY. - When I awoke, it was already day; the train was standing  idle; I was in the last carriage, and, seeing some others strolling  to and fro about the lines, I opened the door and stepped forth, as  from a caravan by the wayside.  We were near no station, nor even,  as far as I could see, within reach of any signal.  A green, open,  undulating country stretched away upon all sides.  Locust trees and  a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest;  but the contours of the land were soft and English.  It was not  quite England, neither was it quite France; yet like enough either  to seem natural in my eyes.  And it was in the sky, and not upon  the earth, that I was surprised to find a change.  Explain it how  you may, and for my part I cannot explain it at all, the sun rises  with a different splendour in America and Europe.  There is more  clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings; more purple,  brown, and smoky orange in those of the new.  It may be from habit,  but to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the  latter; it has a duskier glory, and more nearly resembles sunset;  it seems to fit some subsequential, evening epoch of the world, as  though America were in fact, and not merely in fancy, farther from  the orient of Aurora and the springs of day.  I thought so then, by  the railroad side in Pennsylvania, and I have thought so a dozen  times since in far distant parts of the continent.  If it be an  illusion it is one very deeply rooted, and in which my eyesight is  accomplice.

Soon after a train whisked by, announcing and accompanying its  passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the  engine; and as it was for this we had been waiting, we were  summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our  way.  The whole line, it appeared, was topsy-turvy; an accident at  midnight having thrown all the traffic hours into arrear.  We paid  for this in the flesh, for we had no meals all that day.  Fruit we  could buy upon the cars; and now and then we had a few minutes at  some station with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches for sale;  but we were so many and so ravenous that, though I tried at every  opportunity, the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow  my way to the counter.

Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day.  There  was not a cloud; the sunshine was baking; yet in the woody river  valleys among which we wound our way, the atmosphere preserved a  sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon.  It had an inland  sweetness and variety to one newly from the sea; it smelt of woods,  rivers, and the delved earth.  These, though in so far a country,  were airs from home.  I stood on the platform by the hour; and as I  saw, one after another, pleasant villages, carts upon the highway  and fishers by the stream, and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in  the distance, and beheld the sun, no longer shining blankly on the  plains of ocean, but striking among shapely hills and his light  dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,  I began to exult with myself upon this rise in life like a man who  had come into a rich estate.  And when I had asked the name of a  river from the brakesman, and heard that it was called the  Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed to be part and parcel of  the beauty of the land.  As when Adam with divine fitness named the  creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the  fancy.  That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining  river and desirable valley.

None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special  pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world  where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque  as the United States of America.  All times, races, and languages  have brought their contribution.  Pekin is in the same State with  Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.  Chelsea, with its  London associations of red brick, Sloane Square, and the King's  Road, is own suburb to stately and primeval Memphis; there they  have their seat, translated names of cities, where the Mississippi  runs by Tennessee and Arkansas; and both, while I was crossing the  continent, lay, watched by armed men, in the horror and isolation  of a plague.  Old, red Manhattan lies, like an Indian arrowhead  under a steam factory, below anglified New York.  The names of the  States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most  romantic vocables:  Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa,  Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a  nobler music for the ear:  a songful, tuneful land; and if the new  Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be  enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states  and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.

Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg.   I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow with  her children; these I was to watch over providentially for a  certain distance farther on the way; but as I found she was  furnished with a basket of eatables, I left her in the waiting-room  to seek a dinner for myself.  I mention this meal, not only because  it was the first of which I had partaken for about thirty hours,  but because it was the means of my first introduction to a coloured  gentleman.  He did me the honour to wait upon me after a fashion,  while I was eating; and with every word, look, and gesture marched  me farther into the country of surprise.  He was indeed strikingly  unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe, or the Christy Minstrels  of my youth.  Imagine a gentleman, certainly somewhat dark, but of  a pleasant warm hue, speaking English with a slight and rather odd  foreign accent, every inch a man of the world, and armed with  manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss to name their  parallel in England.  A butler perhaps rides as high over the  unbutlered, but then he sets you right with a reserve and a sort of  sighing patience which one is often moved to admire.  And again,  the abstract butler never stoops to familiarity.  But the coloured  gentleman will pass you a wink at a time; he is familiar like an  upper form boy to a fag; he unbends to you like Prince Hal with  Poins and Falstaff.  He makes himself at home and welcome.  Indeed,  I may say, this waiter behaved himself to me throughout that supper  much as, with us, a young, free, and not very self-respecting  master might behave to a good-looking chambermaid.  I had come  prepared to pity the poor negro, to put him at his ease, to prove  in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice  of race; but I assure you I put my patronage away for another  occasion, and had the grace to be pleased with that result.

Seeing he was a very honest fellow, I consulted him upon a point of  etiquette:  if one should offer to tip the American waiter?   Certainly not, he told me.  Never.  It would not do.  They  considered themselves too highly to accept.  They would even resent  the offer.  As for him and me, we had enjoyed a very pleasant  conversation; he, in particular, had found much pleasure in my  society; I was a stranger; this was exactly one of those rare  conjunctures....  Without being very clear seeing, I can still  perceive the sun at noonday; and the coloured gentleman deftly  pocketed a quarter.

WEDNESDAY. - A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and  orphans on board the train; and morning found us far into Ohio.   This had early been a favourite home of my imagination; I have  played at being in Ohio by the week, and enjoyed some capital sport  there with a dummy gun, my person being still unbreeched.  My  preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY  PAPER, and was read aloud to me by my nurse.  It narrated the  doings of one Custaloga, an Indian brave, who, in the last chapter,  very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir  Reginald Somebody-or-other; a trick I never forgave him.  The idea  of a man being an Indian brave, and then giving that up to be a  baronet, was one which my mind rejected.  It offended  verisimilitude, like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and  others to escape from uninhabited islands.

But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.  We were now on those  great plains which stretch unbroken to the Rocky Mountains.  The  country was flat like Holland, but far from being dull.  All  through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, or for as much as I saw  of them from the train and in my waking moments, it was rich and  various, and breathed an elegance peculiar to itself.  The tall  corn pleased the eye; the trees were graceful in themselves, and  framed the plain into long, aerial vistas; and the clean, bright,  gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer  evenings on the stoop.  It was a sort of flat paradise; but, I am  afraid, not unfrequented by the devil.  That morning dawned with  such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt; a chill that was not  perhaps so measurable by instrument, as it struck home upon the  heart and seemed to travel with the blood.  Day came in with a  shudder.  White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain, as  we see them more often on a lake; and though the sun had soon  dispersed and drunk them up, leaving an atmosphere of fever heat  and crystal pureness from horizon to horizon, the mists had still  been there, and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing  damps and foul malaria.  The fences along the line bore but two  descriptions of advertisement; one to recommend tobaccos, and the  other to vaunt remedies against the ague.  At the point of day, and  while we were all in the grasp of that first chill, a native of the  state, who had got in at some way station, pronounced it, with a  doctoral air, "a fever and ague morning."

The Dutch widow was a person of some character.  She had conceived  at first sight a great aversion for the present writer, which she  was at no pains to conceal.  But being a woman of a practical  spirit, she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions, and  encouraged me to buy her children fruits and candies, to carry all  her parcels, and even to sleep upon the floor that she might profit  by my empty seat.  Nay, she was such a rattle by nature, and, so  powerfully moved to autobiographical talk, that she was forced, for  want of a better, to take me into confidence and tell me the story  of her life.  I heard about her late husband, who seemed to have  made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays.   I could tell you her prospects, her hopes, the amount of her  fortune, the cost of her housekeeping by the week, and a variety of  particular matters that are not usually disclosed except to  friends.  At one station, she shook up her children to look at a  man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.; while to me  she explained how she had been keeping company with this Mr. Z.,  how far matters had proceeded, and how it was because of his  desistance that she was now travelling to the West.  Then, when I  was thus put in possession of the facts, she asked my judgment on  that type of manly beauty.  I admired it to her heart's content.   She was not, I think, remarkably veracious in talk, but broidered  as fancy prompted, and built castles in the air out of her past;  yet she had that sort of candour, to keep me, in spite of all these  confidences, steadily aware of her aversion.  Her parting words  were ingeniously honest.  "I am sure," said she, "we all OUGHT to  be very much obliged to you."  I cannot pretend that she put me at  my ease; but I had a certain respect for such a genuine dislike.  A  poor nature would have slipped, in the course of these  familiarities, into a sort of worthless toleration for me.

We reached Chicago in the evening.  I was turned out of the cars,  bundled into an omnibus, and driven off through the streets to the  station of a different railroad.  Chicago seemed a great and gloomy  city.  I remember having subscribed, let us say sixpence, towards  its restoration at the period of the fire; and now when I beheld  street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable  burghers, I thought it would be a graceful act for the corporation  to refund that sixpence, or, at the least, to entertain me to a  cheerful dinner.  But there was no word of restitution.  I was that  city's benefactor, yet I was received in a third-class waiting- room, and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at  my own expense.

I can safely say, I have never been so dog-tired as that night in  Chicago.  When it was time to start, I descended the platform like  a man in a dream.  It was a long train, lighted from end to end;  and car after car, as I came up with it, was not only filled but  overflowing.  My valise, my knapsack, my rug, with those six  ponderous tomes of Bancroft, weighed me double; I was hot,  feverish, painfully athirst; and there was a great darkness over  me, an internal darkness, not to be dispelled by gas.  When at last  I found an empty bench, I sank into it like a bundle of rags, the  world seemed to swim away into the distance, and my consciousness  dwindled within me to a mere pin's head, like a taper on a foggy  night.

When I came a little more to myself, I found that there had sat  down beside me a very cheerful, rosy little German gentleman,  somewhat gone in drink, who was talking away to me, nineteen to the  dozen, as they say.  I did my best to keep up the conversation; for  it seemed to me dimly as if something depended upon that.  I heard  him relate, among many other things, that there were pickpockets on  the train, who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a  return ticket; but though I caught the words, I do not think I  properly understood the sense until next morning; and I believe I  replied at the time that I was very glad to hear it.  What else he  talked about I have no guess; I remember a gabbling sound of words,  his profuse gesticulation, and his smile, which was highly  explanatory:  but no more.  And I suppose I must have shown my  confusion very plainly; for, first, I saw him knit his brows at me  like one who has conceived a doubt; next, he tried me in German,  supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar with the English tongue;  and finally, in despair, he rose and left me.  I felt chagrined;  but my fatigue was too crushing for delay, and, stretching myself  as far as that was possible upon the bench, I was received at once  into a dreamless stupor.

The little German gentleman was only going a little way into the  suburbs after a DINER FIN, and was bent on entertainment while the  journey lasted.  Having failed with me, he pitched next upon  another emigrant, who had come through from Canada, and was not one  jot less weary than myself.  Nay, even in a natural state, as I  found next morning when we scraped acquaintance, he was a heavy,  uncommunicative man.  After trying him on different topics, it  appears that the little German gentleman flounced into a temper,  swore an oath or two, and departed from that car in quest of  livelier society.  Poor little gentleman!  I suppose he thought an  emigrant should be a rollicking, free-hearted blade, with a flask  of foreign brandy and a long, comical story to beguile the moments  of digestion.

THURSDAY. - I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of  travelling, for when I awoke next morning, I was entirely renewed  in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge, with sweet milk,  and coffee and hot cakes, at Burlington upon the Mississippi.   Another long day's ride followed, with but one feature worthy of  remark.  At a place called Creston, a drunken man got in.  He was  aggressively friendly, but, according to English notions, not at  all unpresentable upon a train.  For one stage he eluded the notice  of the officials; but just as we were beginning to move out of the  next station, Cromwell by name, by came the conductor.  There was a  word or two of talk; and then the official had the man by the  shoulders, twitched him from his seat, marched him through the car,  and sent him flying on to the track.  It was done in three motions,  as exact as a piece of drill.  The train was still moving slowly,  although beginning to mend her pace, and the drunkard got his feet  without a fall.  He carried a red bundle, though not so red as his  cheeks; and he shook this menacingly in the air with one hand,  while the other stole behind him to the region of the kidneys.  It  was the first indication that I had come among revolvers, and I  observed it with some emotion.  The conductor stood on the steps  with one hand on his hip, looking back at him; and perhaps this  attitude imposed upon the creature, for he turned without further  ado, and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell  followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.  They were speaking  English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.

Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the  Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank  of the Missouri river.  Here we were to stay the night at a kind of  caravanserai, set apart for emigrants.  But I gave way to a thirst  for luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with  my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel.  A white clerk and a  coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European way, I should call  the boots, were installed behind a counter like bank tellers.  They  took my name, assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my  packages.  And here came the tug of war.  I wished to give up my  packages into safe keeping; but I did not wish to go to bed.  And  this, it appeared, was impossible in an American hotel.

It was, of course, some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my  unfamiliarity with the language.  For although two nations use the  same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by  the dictionary.  The business of life is not carried on by words,  but in set phrases, each with a special and almost a slang  signification.  Some international obscurity prevailed between me  and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs; so that what I was  asking, which seemed very natural to me, appeared to him a  monstrous exigency.  He refused, and that with the plainness of the  West.  This American manner of conducting matters of business is,  at first, highly unpalatable to the European.  When we approach a  man in the way of his calling, and for those services by which he  earns his bread, we consider him for the time being our hired  servant.  But in the American opinion, two gentlemen meet and have  a friendly talk with a view to exchanging favours if they shall  agree to please.  I know not which is the more convenient, nor even  which is the more truly courteous.  The English stiffness  unfortunately tends to be continued after the particular  transaction is at an end, and thus favours class separations.  But  on the other hand, these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open  field for the insolence of Jack-in-office.

I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal, and unbuttoned  my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.  I knew  nothing, I said, of the ways of American hotels; but I had no  desire to give trouble.  If there was nothing for it but to get to  bed immediately, let him say the word, and though it was not my  habit, I should cheerfully obey.

He burst into a shout of laughter.  "Ah!" said he, "you do not know  about America.  They are fine people in America.  Oh! you will like  them very well.  But you mustn't get mad.  I know what you want.   You come along with me."

And issuing from behind the counter, and taking me by the arm like  an old acquaintance, he led me to the bar of the hotel.

"There," said he, pushing me from him by the shoulder, "go and have  a drink!"

 THE EMIGRANT TRAIN

 All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might  meet with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table.   I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once  more, and put apart with my fellows.  It was about two in the  afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant  House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for  the journey.  A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm,  and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and  called name after name in the tone of a command.  At each name you  would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the  hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us, and I soon  concluded that this was to be set apart for the women and children.   The second or central car, it turned out, was devoted to men  travelling alone, and the third to the Chinese.  The official was  easily moved to anger at the least delay; but the emigrants were  both quick at answering their names, and speedy in getting  themselves and their effects on board.

The families once housed, we men carried the second car without  ceremony by simultaneous assault.  I suppose the reader has some  notion of an American railroad-car, that long, narrow wooden box,  like a flat-roofed Noah's ark, with a stove and a convenience, one  at either end, a passage down the middle, and transverse benches  upon either hand.  Those destined for emigrants on the Union  Pacific are only remarkable for their extreme plainness, nothing  but wood entering in any part into their constitution, and for the  usual inefficacy of the lamps, which often went out and shed but a  dying glimmer even while they burned.  The benches are too short  for anything but a young child.  Where there is scarce elbow-room  for two to sit, there will not be space enough for one to lie.   Hence the company, or rather, as it appears from certain bills  about the Transfer Station, the company's servants, have conceived  a plan for the better accommodation of travellers.  They prevail on  every two to chum together.  To each of the chums they sell a board  and three square cushions stuffed with straw, and covered with thin  cotton.  The benches can be made to face each other in pairs, for  the backs are reversible.  On the approach of night the boards are  laid from bench to bench, making a couch wide enough for two, and  long enough for a man of the middle height; and the chums lie down  side by side upon the cushions with the head to the conductor's van  and the feet to the engine.  When the train is full, of course this  plan is impossible, for there must not be more than one to every  bench, neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.  It  was to bring about this last condition that our white-haired  official now bestirred himself.  He made a most active master of  ceremonies, introducing likely couples, and even guaranteeing the  amiability and honesty of each.  The greater the number of happy  couples the better for his pocket, for it was he who sold the raw  material of the beds.  His price for one board and three straw  cushions began with two dollars and a half; but before the train  left, and, I am sorry to say, long after I had purchased mine, it  had fallen to one dollar and a half.

The match-maker had a difficulty with me; perhaps, like some  ladies, I showed myself too eager for union at any price; but  certainly the first who was picked out to be my bedfellow, declined  the honour without thanks.  He was an old, heavy, slow-spoken man,  I think from Yankeeland, looked me all over with great timidity,  and then began to excuse himself in broken phrases.  He didn't know  the young man, he said.  The young man might be very honest, but  how was he to know that?  There was another young man whom he had  met already in the train; he guessed he was honest, and would  prefer to chum with him upon the whole.  All this without any sort  of excuse, as though I had been inanimate or absent.  I began to  tremble lest every one should refuse my company, and I be left  rejected.  But the next in turn was a tall, strapping, long-limbed,  small-headed, curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman, with a soldierly  smartness in his manner.  To be exact, he had acquired it in the  navy.  But that was all one; he had at least been trained to  desperate resolves, so he accepted the match, and the white-haired  swindler pronounced the connubial benediction, and pocketed his  fees.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train.  I am  afraid to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine,  certainly a score; then came the Chinese, then we, then the  families, and the rear was brought up by the conductor in what, if  I have it rightly, is called his caboose.  The class to which I  belonged was of course far the largest, and we ran over, so to  speak, to both sides; so that there were some Caucasians among the  Chinamen, and some bachelors among the families.  But our own car  was pure from admixture, save for one little boy of eight or nine  who had the whooping-cough.  At last, about six, the long train  crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri  river to Omaha, westward bound.

It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.  There was  thunder in the air, which helped to keep us restless.  A man played  many airs upon the cornet, and none of them were much attended to,  until he came to "Home, sweet home."  It was truly strange to note  how the talk ceased at that, and the faces began to lengthen.  I  have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or  bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best  described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.  Pathos must be  relieved by dignity of treatment.  If you wallow naked in the  pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you make your  hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are  moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their  weakness.  It did not come to tears that night, for the experiment  was interrupted.  An elderly, hard-looking man, with a goatee beard  and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would expect from  a retired slaver, turned with a start and bade the performer stop  that "damned thing."  "I've heard about enough of that," he added;  "give us something about the good country we're going to."  A  murmur of adhesion ran round the car; the performer took the  instrument from his lips, laughed and nodded, and then struck into  a dancing measure; and, like a new Timotheus, stilled immediately  the emotion he had raised.