ee, a bird,
or a river. Only down the long, sterile canyons, the train shot hooting,
and awoke the resting echo. That train was the one piece of life in all
the deadly land; it was the one actor, the one spectacle fit to be
observed in this paralysis of man and nature. And when I think how the
railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of
savage tribes, and now will bear an emigrant for some L12 from the
Atlantic to the Golden Gates; how at each stage of the construction,
roaring, impromptu cities, full of gold and lust and death, sprang up
and then died away again, and are now but wayside stations in the
desert; how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked
side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking
together in a mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking,
quarrelling, and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord
of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the "bad
medicine waggon" charioting his foes; and then when I go on to remember
that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock-coats,
and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a
subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me, I own, as if this railway
were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live, as if it
brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the
degrees of social rank, and offered to some great writer the busiest,
the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary
work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we
require, what was Troy town to this? But, alas! it is not these things
that are necessary--it is only Homer.

Here also we are grateful to the train, as to some god who conducts us
swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils. Thirst,
hunger, the sleight and ferocity of Indians, are all no more feared, so
lightly do we skim these horrible lands; as the gull, who wings safely
through the hurricane and past the shark. Yet we should not be forgetful
of these hardships of the past; and to keep the balance true, since I
have complained of the trifling discomforts of my journey, perhaps more
than was enough, let me add an original document. It was not written by
Homer, but by a boy of eleven, long since dead, and is dated only twenty
years ago. I shall punctuate, to make things clearer, but not change the
spelling.

"_My dear Siste