THE CONDUCTOR'S STORY.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3080, 11 May 1881, Page 4

THE CONDUCTOR'S STORY.

"Yes," said, tho'conduc tor, biting off the tip of a cigar, and slowly scratching.a match on his leg ; " I'vo seen a good deal of railroad life that's interesting and exciting in the twenty yeai's that I've been twisting brakes and slamming doors for a living. " I've seen ull kinds of sorrow and all kinds of joy—seen the happy bridal couple starting out on their wedding tour with the bright and hopeful future before them, and the black-robed mourner on her way to a new-made grave wherein she must bm*y the idol of her lonely old heart.

" Wealth and pinching poverty ride on the same train and the merry laugh of the joyous healthy child is mingled with the despairing sigh of the aged. The great antipodes of life are familiar to the conductor, for every day the extremes of the world are meeting beneath his eye. "I've mutilated the ticket of many a blackleg and handled the passes of all our most eminent dead-heads. I don't know what walk of life is more crowded with thrilling incidents than mine." " Ever have any smash-ups?" " Smash-ups ? Oh, yes several of them. None, however, that couldn't have been a good deal worse.

"There is one incident of my railroad life," continued the conductor, running his tongue carefully over a broken place in the wrapper of his cigar, " that I never spoke of before to anyone. It has caused me more misery and wretchedness than any one thing that ever happened to me in my official career.

" Scm-'times even now, after a lapse of many years, I awake in the night with the cold drops of agony standing on my face and the horrible nightmare upon me with its terrible surroundings, as plain as on the memorable night it occurred. " I was running extra on the Union Pacific for a conductor who was an old : friend of mine, and who had gone South on a vacation for his health.

** At about 7.30 as near as I can remember, we were sailing along all comfortable one evening with a straight stretch of track ahead for ten or fifteen miles, running on time and everybody feeling tip-top, as overland travellers do who get acquainted with each other and feel congenial. All at once the train suddenly slowed down, and ran in an old siding and stopped. "Of course, I got out and ran ahead to the engine to see what the matter was. Old Antifat, the engineer, had got down and was on the main track looking ahead to where, twinkling along about six or seven miles down the road, apparently was the headlight of an approaching train. It was evidently ' wild,' for nothing was due that he knew of at that hour.

: "However, we had been almost miraclously saved from a frightful wreck by the engineer's watchfulness, and everybody, went forward and shook old Antifat by the hand, and cried and thanked him till it was the most affecting scene for a while that I ever witnessed. It was as though he had stopped upon the very verge of a bottomless chasm, and everybody was laughing and crying at once, till it was a kind of cross between a revival and a picnic. "After we had waited about half an hour, I should say, for the wild train to come up and pass us, and apparently she was no nearer, a cold,, clammy suspicion began to bore itself into the adamantine shell of my intellect. The more I thought of it, the more unhappy I felt. I almosfc'wished that. I was dead. Cold streaks ran up my back followed by hot ones. I wanted to go home. I wanted to be where the hungry, prying eyes of the great, throbbing work-day world could not see me.

" I called Antifat one side and said something to him. He, swore softly to himself and kicked the ground, and looked at the headlights still glimmering in the distance. Then he got on his engine, and' I yelled " All aboard." In a few moments we were moving again, and the . general impression was thatthe train ahead was side tracked, and waiting for us, although there wasn't a side track within twenty miles, except the one we had just left. "It was never exactly clear to the passengers where we passed that wild train, but I didn't explain it to them. I was too much engrossed with my surging thoughts. " I never felt my own inferiority so much as I did that night. • ,1 never so fully realised what a mere speck man is upon the bosom of the universe.

"When I surveyed the starry vault of heaven and considered the illimitable space, where, beyond and stretching on and on for ever, countless suns are placed as centres, around which solar systems are revolving in their regular orbits, each little world peopled perhaps with its teeming millions of struggling _• humanity; and then other and mightier systems of worlds revolving about these systems till the mind is dazed and giddy with the mighty thought; and then when_ I compared all this universeal magnificence, this brilliant aggregation of worlds and systems of worlds, with one' poor, grovelling worm of the dust, only a little insignificant atom, only a poor, weak, erring, worthless, fallible, blind, groping! railroad conductor, with my train peacefully side-tracked in the gathering gloom, and patiently waiting for the planet Venus to pass on the main track, there was something about the whole sombre picture that has overshadowed my whole life and made me unhappy. ".'.-.':. •.. " Sometimes Antifat and myself meet at some liquid restaurant and silently take something in memory of our great sorrow, but never mention it. We never tear open the old rankling wound or-;laugh over the night we politely gave the .main track to Venus while we stood patiently on the siding,"—Detroit Eree Press.