descriptions, adapted for summer
reading, of rushing cascades, lichened rocks, waving pines, and
snow-capped mountains; but in April these things are not there. The
place is locked up--dead as a frozen corpse. The mountain torrent is a
boss of palest emerald ice against the dazzle of the snow; the
pine-stumps are capped and hooded with gigantic mushrooms of snow; the
rocks are overlaid five feet deep; the rocks, the fallen trees, and the
lichens together, and the dumb white lips curl up to the track cut in
the side of the mountain, and grin there fanged with gigantic icicles.
You may listen in vain when the train stops for the least sign of breath
or power among the hills. The snow has smothered the rivers, and the
great looping trestles run over what might be a lather of suds in a huge
wash-tub. The old snow near by is blackened and smirched with the smoke
of locomotives, and its dulness is grateful to aching eyes. But the men
who live upon the line have no consideration for these things. At a
halting-place in a gigantic gorge walled in by the snows, one of them
reels from a tiny saloon into the middle of the track where half-a-dozen
dogs are chasing a pig off the metals. He is beautifully and eloquently
drunk. He sings, waves his hands, and collapses behind a shunting
engine, while four of the loveliest peaks that the Almighty ever moulded
look down upon him. The landslide that should have wiped that saloon
into kindlings has missed its mark and has struck a few miles down the
line. One of the hillsides moved a little in dreaming of the spring and
caught a passing freight train. Our cars grind cautiously by, for the
wrecking engine has only just come through. The deceased engine is
standing on its head in soft earth thirty or forty feet down the slide,
and two long cars loaded with shingles are dropped carelessly atop of
it. It looks so marvellously like a toy train flung aside by a child,
that one cannot realise what it means till a voice cries, 'Any one
killed?' The answer comes back, 'No; all jumped'; and you perceive with
a sense of personal insult that this slovenliness of the mountain is an
affair which may touch your own sacred self. In which case.... But the
train is out on a trestle, into a tunnel, and out on a trestle again. It
was here that every one began to despair of the line when it was under
construction, because there seemed to be no outlet. But a man came, as a
man always will, and put a descent thus