Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 October 1883 — All Emigrant Train. [ARTICLE]

All Emigrant Train.

A night in a Western emigrant train is thns described by R. L. Stevenson, in Longman's Magazine : I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way, .and at last, whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some' wayside eat-ing-house, the evening wo left Laramie I’fell sick outright. That was a night which I shall not readily forget. The lamps did not go out; each made a i faint shining in its own neighborhood, and the shadows were confounded together in the long, hollow box of the car. The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes; here two chums alongside, flat upon their backs like dead folk; there a man sprawling on the floor, with his face upon his arm; there another half- [ seated, with his head and shoulders on, the bench. The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the movement of the train; others stirred,* turned or stretched out their arms like children; it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in their sleep; and, as I passed to and fro, stepping across the prostrate, and caught now a snore, now a gasp, now a half-formed word, it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle. Although it was chill, I was obliged to open my window, for tlia degradation of the air soon became intolerable to one who was awake and using the full supply of life. .Outside in a glimmering night, I saw the black, amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly into our wake. They that long for morning have never longed for it more earnestly than I, and yet when day cam a it was to shine upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the world. Mile upon mile and not a tree, a bird or a river. Only down the long, sterile canons, 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 ob-served-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 immigrant for some £l2 from the Atlantic to the Golden Gate; 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, gauibling, drinking, quarreling and murdering like wolves; how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard, in this last fastness, the scream of the “bad-medicine wagon,” charioting his foes; and then, when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted hv 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 i typical achievement of the age in ] which we live, as, if it brought together, j 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 ft be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this ? _—