and musk-rats; where flourished
in luxuriant profusion, bulrushes, water-cresses, pond-lilies, and such
like amphibious and un-get-at-able vegetables. Through that particular
locality a train of cars was not only seen, but heard going at 2'40"
speed over a pile-bridge, made across a Michigan swamp, by driving
black-oak logs end-wise into the mud. The people therein were covered
with dust, as thickly as if each man had been a locomoting Pompeii,
each woman a perambulating Herculaneum, and some vagrant Vesuvius had
been showering ashes on them all for a month. They were lying about
loose in the cars, after the ordinary fashion of people on a tedious
railway journey; curled up in some such ungraceful and uneasy positions
as the tired beasts of a strolling menagerie probably assume in their
cages during their forced marches across the country. To carry out the
parallel, the conductor came along at irregular intervals, and with
deliberate and premeditated malignity, stirred up the passengers, as if
they were actually animals on exhibition, and he really was their
keeper, and wanted to make them growl. And this conductor, in common
with conductors in general, deserves notice for the diabolical ingenuity
which he displayed in forcing from his helpless victims the greatest
number of growls in a limited space of time.

The cars had just left the flourishing prairie city of Scraggville,
which contains seven houses and a tavern, and a ten-acre lot for a
church, in the centre of which the minister holds forth now from a cedar
stump. At the tavern, dinner had been served up, and the conductor,
according to the usual custom, had started the train as soon, without
waiting for his passengers to eat anything, as the money was collected.
The population of our train, which exceeded that of the great city of
Scraggville by about one hundred and seventy persons, had composed
itself for a short nap, and the various individuals had settled as
nearly into their old places as possible, when a man, remarkable for a
particularly lofty shirt-collar, a wooden leg, and an unusual quantity
of dust on the bridge of his nose, began to sing. He commenced that
touching ballad, now so popular, "the affecting history of Vilikins and
his Dinah." The pathos of his words, added to the unusual power of his
voice, waked up his right-hand neighbor, before he had proceeded any
further than to inform the listeners that,

"Vilikins vas a-valking"----

This ne