And my advice to all people is, Don’t stay at
home any more than you can help; but when you have
got to stay at home a while, buy a package of
those insurance tickets and sit up nights. You
cannot be too cautious.
[One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent
in the manner recorded at the top of this sketch.]
The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless
people grumble more than is fair about railroad management
in the United States. When we consider that every
day and night of the year full fourteen thousand railway-trains
of various kinds, freighted with life and armed with
death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is,
not that they kill three hundred human beings
in a twelvemonth, but that they do not kill three
hundred times three hundred!
I never can look at those periodical portraits in
the galaxy magazine without feeling a wild,
tempestuous ambition to be an artist. I have
seen thousands and thousands of pictures in my time
—acres of them here and leagues of them
in the galleries of Europe —but never any
that moved me as these portraits do.
There is a portrait of Monsignore Capel in the November
number, now could anything be sweeter than that?
And there was Bismarck’s, in the October number;
who can look at that without being purer and stronger
and nobler for it? And Thurlow and Weed’s
picture in the September number; I would not have
died without seeing that, no, not for anything this
world can give. But look back still further
and recall my own likeness as printed in the August
number; if I had been in my grave a thousand years
when that appeared, I would have got up and visited
the artist.
I sleep with all these portraits under my pillow every
night, so that I can go on studying them as soon as
the day dawns in the morning. I know them all
as thoroughly as if I had made them myself; I know
every line and mark about them. Sometimes when
company are present I shuffle the portraits all up
together, and then pick them out one by one and call
their names, without referring to the printing on
the bottom. I seldom make a mistake—never,
when I am calm.
I have had the portraits framed for a long time, waiting
till my aunt gets everything ready for hanging them
up in the parlor. But first one thing and then
another interferes, and so the thing is delayed.
Once she said they would have more of the peculiar
kind of light they needed in the attic. The
old simpleton! it is as dark as a tomb up there.
But she does not know anything about art, and so
she has no reverence for it. When I showed her
my “Map of the Fortifications of Paris,”
she said it was rubbish.
