show us in perfection a kind of man new to the
world. Out somewhere on the Santa Fe route, where the desert of one day
was like the desert of the day before, and the Pullman car rolls and
swings over the wide waste beneath the blue sky day after day, under its
black flag of smoke, in the early gray of morning, when the men were
waiting their turns at the ablution bowls, a slip of a boy, perhaps aged
seven, stood balancing himself on his little legs, clad in
knicker-bockers, biding his time, with all the nonchalance of an old
campaigner. "How did you sleep, cap?" asked a well-meaning elderly
gentleman. "Well, thank you," was the dignified response; "as I always do
on a sleeping-car." Always does? Great horrors! Hardly out of his
swaddling-clothes, and yet he always sleeps well in a sleeper! Was he
born on the wheels? was he cradled in a Pullman? He has always been in
motion, probably; he was started at thirty miles an hour, no doubt, this
marvelous boy of our new era. He was not born in a house at rest, but the
locomotive snatched him along with a shriek and a roar before his eyes
were fairly open, and he was rocked in a "section," and his first
sensation of life was that of moving rapidly over vast arid spaces,
through cattle ranges and along canons. The effect of quick and easy
locomotion on character may have been noted before, but it seems that
here is the production of a new sort of man, the direct product of our
railway era. It is not simply that this boy is mature, but he must be a
different and a nobler sort of boy than one born, say, at home or on a
canal-boat; for, whether he was born on the rail or not, he belongs to
the railway system of civilization. Before he gets into trousers he is
old in experience, and he has discounted many of the novelties that
usually break gradually on the pilgrim in this world. He belongs to the
new expansive race that must live in motion, whose proper home is the
Pullman (which will probably be improved in time into a dustless,
sweet-smelling, well-aired bedroom), and whose domestic life will be on
the wing, so to speak. The Inter-State Commerce Bill will pass him along
without friction from end to end of the Union, and perhaps a uniform
divorce law will enable him to change his marital relations at any place
where he happens to dine. This promising lad is only a faint intimation
of what we are all coming to when we fully acquire the freedom of the
continent, and come into that expa