of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,
sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard,
informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the
circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side.
As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the
track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns.
Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is
there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And
here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like
long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls,
and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell
within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a
chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all
the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down
goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come
the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary
motion--or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with
that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system,
since its orbit does not look like a returning curve--with its steam
cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like
many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its
masses to the light--as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller,
would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when
I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder,
shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his
nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into
the new Mythology I don't know), it seems as if the earth had got a
race now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the
elements their servants for noble ends! If the cloud that hangs over the
engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that
which floats over the farmer's fields, then the elements and Nature
herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their
escort.

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I
do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train
of clouds st