EVERY-DAY HEROES.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 804, 20 April 1871, Page 3

EVERY-DAY HEROES.

[Prom the "New York Tribune," February B.[ Two simple little incidents come to us in our exchanges, which seem to us at least as well worth the telling as the latest history of adultery and murder. One is the story of a poor acrobat out West, who was dashed from his giddy height to the ground; and who, when the crowd gathered about him, raised himself, mangled and bleeding, to gasp our. entreaties for them to save the two girls left unsupported on the trapi ze. He refused to be lifted until they were rescued, and in the agony of his fall and shattered limbs was the only man in the large audience who forgot his own necessities and had the cool presence of mind to direct how they should be brought down. When they were safe, pain got the better of him, and he was carried as dead off the stage. The women were strangers to hini. The other story is of a little girl who wandered on to the track of the Delaware railroad as a freight train of nineteen cars was approaching. As it turned the sharp top of the grade, opposite Bt. George's, the engineer saw the child for the first time, blew " down brakes," and reversed the engine. But it was too late to slacken its speed in time, and the poor baby got up, and, laughing, ran to meet it. " I told the conductor," says the engineer, " if he could jump off the engine, and, running ahead, pick the child up before the engine reached her he might save her life, which he did. The engine was within one foot of the child when he secured it, and they were both saved. I would not run the same risk of saving a child again by way of experiment for all Newcastle county, for nine out of ten might not escape. He took the child to the lane, and she walked to the house, and a little girl was coming after it when we left." The honest engineer, having finished his day's run, sits down the next morning, and writes this homely letter to the father of the child, "in order that it may be -more carefully watched in future," and thanking God "that himself and the baby's mother slept tranquilly last night, and were spared the life-long pangs of remorse." It does not occur to him to even mention the conductor's name, who, he seems to think, did no uncommon thing in risking his own life, unseen and uunoticed, on the solitary road, for a child whom he would never probably see again. The moral of the story to him and to the good clergyman who publishes it was, apparently, that mothers should keep their children off the tracks It seems to us to have a different meaning, which every man can read for himself. We give the simple little story a place, therefore, among the histories of the war and murders, and records of the police court, for no practical lesson, but just as one would hang a bit of f'green landscape on his wall on a winter day. After all, in spite of the transient rain, there is a summer and God. It is worth while to remind ourselves of that now and then. We believe, too, with the plain-speaking engine-driver, that the conductor did nothing more than eight out of ten manly young fellows would have done in his position. Police reports and the daily press bring the murders and meannesses of the world so constantly to the surface on week days, and the clergy open our eyes to human depravity so clearly on Sundays, that we are apt to overlook the actual honor and integrity in the mass of ordinary poople about us. We grow so bilious in our reforming zeal that it is worth while to be shaken into a more Christian charity, and convinced that it is not a matter of wonder to find a Bayard in the poor conductor of a freight-train, or a man in a circus rider.