Several have turned in, and are now snorting
approval of themselves, and of sleep as an
institution generally. Others, like young crows
balancing on the spring boughs, swing their
Yankee legs, lean and yellow, from the wicker
trays, and peel off their stockings, or struggle
to get rid of their boots. A Mississippi
man, in a faded green dress-coat and gilt
buttons, undoes the blue ribbon that fancifully
and romantically fastens his coat in front.
A thin commercial traveller for a Philadelphia
tobacco house, next him, is telling a story of
American recklessness.

"After the late dreadful shipwreck of the
Lady Elgin, on Lake Michigan, a terrible
catastrophe in which I myself narrowly escaped
being a sufferer, two survivors one floating on
a hencoop, the other on a cabin-door washed
up together for a moment. The wind roared its
cruel requiem; the waves beat and raved. Did
one wretched man cry, 'God save us!' and
'Amen!' the other? No.

"Says Colonel Junius Chitterden to Augustus
Erastus Corning:

"'A Roman punch would not be a bad thing
now, mister?'

"Says Augustus Erastus Corning to Colonel
Junius:

"'No, darn me! but I'd rather have a mint
julep.'

"And then a great sea came and washed them
angry apart. The colonel perished. Augustus
Erastus was saved to partake of more mint
juleps."

Laughing at this rather ghastly bit of fun, I
clambered to my perch. The tray was narrow
and high. It was like lying on one's back on
the narrow plank thrown across a torrent. If
I turned my back to the carriage wall, the
motion bumped me off my bed altogether; if I
turned my face to the wall, I felt a horrible
sensation of being likely to roll down backwards,
to be three minutes afterwards picked up in
detached portions.

I lay on my back, and so settled the question;
but then the motion! The American railroads
are cheaply made and hastily constructed.
They have often, on even great roads, but one
line of rails, and that one line of rails is anything
but even. Some years ago, the railroads in
Virginia were so wretched that negroes were
employed to run before the engine at certain risky
places and nail down the "snake heads," as the
loose jags of the sprung rails were called. Sleeping!
It was like sleeping on a runaway horse.

Then the stoppages, the clashing of the bell
on the engine at "Chittenanga," "Manlius,"
"Canton, "Jordan," "Canaserago," and all
the other places wilh Indian, classical, or
scriptural names. Then, if I peered through the
zinc ventilator into the outer darkness, a flying
scud of sparks from the engine-funnel did not
serve to divest my mind of all chances of being
burnt. Then, there were blazes of pine-torches
aa we neared a station, fresh bell clamour and
jumbling sounds of baggage, slamming doors,
and itinerant conductors.

Erastus and Zenas, you talk of our English
trains exceeding yours in speed! Why we are
flying now, not gliding or rushing— among
pine-trees and Indian corn patches, past
glimmering white plank houses— jolting to and
fro— swaying with high pressure, and the
driver, I'll be sworn, sitting on the safety-valve,
stimulated by juleps, spitting at the darkness,
and roaring out,

"We're bound to run all night,
We're bound to run all day;
I bet my money on the bob-tailed mare,
Who will bet on the grey!"

And to him, red in the firelight, I know the
gigantic negro stoker replies, with a ferocious
scrap of an anti-Abraham-Lincoln-election song,

"O out in old Kentucky,
And in South further down,
When the people take a fancy
That a rogue must leave the town,
they ride him on a rail,
And it isn't very often
He comes back to tell the tale,
After riding on a rail!
After riding on a rail!"

Ever since I first saw New York gleaming
white across the bay, I had heard the Irish
newsboy every morning in Broadway, shouting
of nothing but railway disasters, smashes
and splinterings and burnings and runnings into.
A dreadful accident down in "Illonoy" had
particularly struck me as a warning; for there,
while the shattered bodies were still being drawn
from under the piles of shivered carriages, the
driver on being expostulated with, had replied:

"I suppose this ain't the first railway
accident by long chalks!"

Upon which the indignant passengers were
with difficulty prevented from lynching the
wretch; but he fled into the woods, and there
for a time escaped pursuit.

But, two other railway journeys pressed more
peculiarly on my mind; one was that of eight
or ten weeks ago, from Canandaigua to Antrim.
It was there a gentleman from Baltimore, fresh
from Chicago, told me of a railway accident he
had himself been witness to, only two days before
I met him. The 2·40 (night) train from Toledo
to Chicago, in which he rode, was upset near
Pocahontas by two logs that had evidently been
wilfully laid across the rails. On inquiry at the
next station, it was discovered that a farmer who
had had, a week before, two stray calves killed
near the same place, had been heard at a liquor
store to say he would 'pay them out for his
calves.' This was enough for the excited
passengers, vexed at the detention, and enraged at
the malice that had exposed them to danger of
death. A posse of them instantly sallied out,
beleaguered the farmer's house, seized him after
some resistance, put a rope round his neck,
dragged him to the nearest tree, and would have
then and there lynched him, had not two or
three of the passengers rescued him, revolver in
hand, and given him up to the nearest magistrate.

The second, was that long journey through
the pine country of Carolina, where the sand