HOW THEY PLAY THE PIANO IN NEW ORLEANS.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume IV, Issue 1091, 3 November 1883, Page 2

HOW THEY PLAY THE PIANO IN NEW ORLEANS.

“ I was loafing around the streets last night,” said Jem Nelson, one of the oldest locomotive engineers running into New Orleans, “ and as I had nothing to do, I dropped into a concert and heard a slick-looking Frenchman play a piano in a way that made me feel over in spots. As soon as he sat down on the stool I knew by the way 1 he handled himself that he understood the machine he was running. He tapped the keys way up one end, just as if they were gauges and he wanted to see il he had water enough. Then he looked up, as if he wanted to know how much steam he was carrying, and the next moment he pulled open the throttle and sailed out on the main line as if he were half an hour late. You could hear her thunder over culverts and bridges, and getting faster and faster, until the fellow rocked about in his seat like a cradle. Some how I thonght it was old ‘ 36 ’ pulling a passenger train, and getting out of the way of a * special.’ The fellow worked the keys on the middle division like lightning, and then he flew along the north end of the line until the drivers went round like a buzz-saw, and I got excited. About the time I was trying to tell him to cut her off a little, he kicked the dampers under the machine wide open, pulled the throttle valve way back in the tender, and—Jerusalem—how he did run. I couldn’t stand il any longer, and yelled to him that he was pounding on the left side, and if he wasn’t careful he’d drop his ash pan. But he did not hear. No one heard me. Everything was flying and whizzing. Telegraph poles on the side of the track looked like cornstalks, the trees appeared to be a mud bank, and all the tinse the exhaust of the old machine sounded like the hum of a bumble bee. I tried to yell out, but my tongue would not move. He went round curves like a bullet, slipped an eccentric, blew out his soft plug, went down grades fifty feet to the mile, and not a confounded brake set. She went by the Imeeting point at a mile and a half a minute, and calling for more steam. My hair stood up like a cat’s tail, because I knew the game was up. Sure enough, dead ahead of us was the tail light of the ‘ special.’ In a daze I heard the crash as they struck, and I saw cars shivered into atoms, people mashed, and mangled, and bleeding, and gasping for water. I heard another crash as the French professor struck the deep keys away do wn on the lower end of the southern division, and then I came to my senses. There he was at a dead standstill, with the door of the fiie-box of the machine open, wiping the perspiration off his face, and bowing at the people before him. If I live to be a thousand years old, I’ll never forget the ride that Frenchman gave me on the piano.”