e sign to Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watched
them, Michael and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendid
cloud, their flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out to
the Night, until there was nothing but a dull red murmur and the
falling of smoke.

Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the foot
that was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been a
brakeman himself.

Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, but
they love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given to
brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by that
their ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them,--hundreds
of lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from the
outside, but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glistening
lights, roar, dust, and water, and death, and life,--these play their
endless spell upon them. They love the shining of the track. It is
wrought into the very fibre of their being.

Years pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade the
brakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always see
them--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying and
rocking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity.

They are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry of
their calling. It is the poetry of the calling that keeps them there.

Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but our one peephole in the
universe, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough and
stand close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our lives
the secret that throbs through it all.

For a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what an
ideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and a
life in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, this
also is to have lived.

The fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroad
man that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interest
pertaining to human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art of
the present day, and to the future of its literature. It is as much a
symbol of the art of a machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol of
the art of an heroic age.

That it is next to impossible to get a sailor, with all his hardships,
to turn his back upon the sea is a fact a great many thousand years
old. We find it accounted for not o