the track standing
with his poor little fluffy back to the pitiless pelting. He was pounded
to death. An old horse met his doom on the run. He galloped wildly
towards the train, but his hind legs dropped into a hole half water and
half ice. He beat the ground with his fore-feet for a minute and then
rolling over on his side submitted quietly to be killed.

When the storm ceased, we picked our way cautiously and crippledly over
a track that might give way at any moment. The Western driver urges his
train much as does the Subaltern the bounding pony, and 'twould seem
with an equal sense of responsibility. If a foot does go wrong, why
there you are, don't you know, and if it is all right, why all right it
is, don't you know. But I would sooner be on the pony than the train.

This seems a good place wherein to preach on American versatility. When
Mr. Howells writes a novel, when a reckless hero dams a flood by heaving
a dynamite-shattered mountain into it, or when a notoriety-hunting
preacher marries a couple in a balloon, you shall hear the great
American press rise on its hind legs and walk round mouthing over the
versatility of the American citizen. And he is versatile--horribly so.
The unlimited exercise of the right of private judgment (which, by the
way, is a weapon not one man in ten is competent to handle), his blatant
cocksureness, and the dry-air-bred restlessness that makes him crawl all
over the furniture when he is talking to you, conspire to make him
versatile. But what he calls versatility the impartial bystander of
Anglo-Indian extraction is apt to deem mere casualness, and dangerous
casualness at that. No man can grasp the inwardness of an employ by the
light of pure reason--even though that reason be republican. He must
serve an apprenticeship to one craft and learn that craft all the days
of his life if he wishes to excel therein. Otherwise he merely "puts the
thing through somehow;" and occasionally he doesn't. But wherein lies
the beauty of this form of mental suppleness? Old man California, whom I
shall love and respect always, told me one or two anecdotes about
American versatility and its consequences that came back to my mind with
direful force as the train progressed. We didn't upset, but I don't
think that that was the fault of the driver or the men who made the
track. Take up--you can easily find them--the accounts of ten
consecutive railway catastrophes--not little accidents, but first-class
f