We are not particularly glad to hear this.  Already the locomotive is rocking a good deal more than is quite pleasant to the uninitiated, and the contrast between the hard seat and the pleasant one at our disposal in the Pullman car is becoming more and more obvious.  Just as we are wondering how it will be possible to preserve one’s equilibrium while going around a curve in the distance, a cow strays sheepishly on to the track, apparently some 200 yards ahead.  The engineer plays a tune with his whistle, and the cow proceeds to trot down the track in front of us.  That singularly misnamed appendage, the cow-catcher, strikes her amidships.  She is thrown twenty feet in the air, and all that is left of her rolls into the ditch by the side of the track.

For the moment we had forgotten George Stephenson’s reply to the member of the British Parliament, who asked him what would happen in the event of a cow getting in front of one of the trains George was proposing to run, if necessary powers could be obtained.  His reply, which has long since become historical, was that it would be very bad for the cow.  We remembered this, and agreed with the pioneer railroad man when we saw the unfortunate bovine turn a quadruple somersault and terminate her existence in less than a second.  But a moment previously we had been wondering what would happen when the inevitable collision took place.

The fireman observes that the occurrence has somewhat unnerved us, and in a good-natured way assures us that a little thing of that kind doesn’t amount to anything.  It is pretty bad, he says, when a bunch of cows get on a track, and he remembers once, several years ago, having a train stopped out in the Far West by a bunch of fat steers, which blocked up the track.  “But,” he adds, by way of parenthesis, “that was on a very poor road with a broken-down freight locomotive.  If we had had “87,” with a full head of steam on, we could have got through all right, even if we had to overload the market with beef.”

Now the train rushes around a curve in one direction and now in another.  The engineer never relaxes his vigilance, and, although he affects to make light of the responsibility, and assures his somewhat nervous passenger that there is no danger of any kind, his actions do not bear out his words.  We are running special, a little ahead of the mid-day express schedule, and at every station there are waiting passengers who herald our approach with delight, and, gathering together their packages, advance to the edge of the platform evidently supposing we are going to stop for them.  That we are to dash through the station at a speed of fifty or sixty miles an hour, does not occur to them as a remote possibility, and the looks of astonishment which greet us as we rush past the platform are amusing.  Finally, we reach a long stretch of level track, where the rails are laid as straight as an arrow for apparently several miles ahead.