t a conveyance, are on
hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is now the
byword; and it is worth the while to be warned so often and so sincerely
by any power to get off its track. There is no stopping to read the
riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob, in this case. We have
constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside. (Let that be
the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that at a certain hour and
minute these bolts will be shot toward particular points of the compass;
yet it interferes with no man's business, and the children go to school
on the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are all educated
thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path
but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.

What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does
not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men every day go
about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more
even than they suspect, and perchance better employed than they could
have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood
up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady
and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter
quarters; who have not merely the three-o'-clock-in-the-morning courage,
which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to
rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews
of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,
perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear the
muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled
breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay,
notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast snow-storm, and
I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering,
above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the
nests of field mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an
outside place in the universe.

Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and
unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than
many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its
singular success. I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train
rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors
all the