e method of communication between
passengers and the engine, in case of emergency, is by what is known as
the "bell-cord" which runs from end to end of the train, suspended from
the middle of the ceiling of each car in a series of swinging rings. The
cord sways loosely in the air to each motion of the train like a
slackened clothes-line in a gale. On the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe
Railway the story used to be told that at the end of the day the
conductors would toss each coin received into the air to see if it would
balance on the bell-cord. The coins which balanced went to the company;
those which did not, the conductor took as his own.

That, be it noted, was the state of affairs some twenty-four years ago.
I question if there is much more peculation on the part of the employees
of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe to-day than there is on the part
of the servants of the Great Western of England or any other British
company.

The place where the conductor advised me not to buy a ticket had then a
few yards of planking laid on the prairie for a platform and a small
shed as a station building. The town consisted of three or four brick
buildings and a huddle of wooden shanties. To-day it is one of the
twenty most populous cities in the United States with tall office
buildings, broad busy streets, and sumptuous private residences. I used
to have excellent trout-fishing in what is now the centre of a great
town. Where the air to-day is filled with the hum of wheels and the roar
of machinery, then was only open prairie innocent of any evidence of
human occupation beyond some three or four things like dog-kennels badly
built of loose lattice-work on the river's bank. These were the red
Indians' Turkish baths.

The old code of morality has vanished with the red Indian and the
trout-fishing. In the early days of that town there used to be nobody to
maintain public order but an efficient Vigilance Committee, which
executed justice by the simple process of hanging persons whom the
public disliked, and which was still in nominal existence when I was
there. Now the city has the proper complement of courts, from the United
States Court downwards, and a bar which has already furnished one or two
members to the United States Senate. Of course this has happened in the
very far West but the change which has come over New York in the same
length of time is no less astonishing if less picturesque. It is as
unjust to compare the mo