Seeds of Pine. Emily F. Murphy

primal ploughers of the land, these railway fellows, and can cut a valley out of a hill, like it were the rip of a brutal blade. To my thinking, this is an enterprise of high heart and bravery. … . And yet, as I watch them at work, heaping up a grade, they seem small to me, and paltry, like dirty boys intent on nothing more serious than mud-pies. In some places, they build through marshy dunes that are coppery-brown and tawny-red. Walking in these places is like walking upstairs all the way, or like treading in deep straw, forms of exercise most certainly concomitant with heart disease and a hackney gait. Westward they go and Westward, these uncouth moving pictures of the landscape, that change well-nigh as quick as those on a canvas, but always it is a picture of a grade, a new cut, a gridiron of ties, and long, long trails of steel. I tell you, these trails are the heartstrings of the North.

      But you must not think that the only builders are the men. The horses, mules and oxen help. Some folk there are who mislike the oxen, but these are foolishly prejudiced and ill-informed. The ox, it is true, has a tiresome straddling gait, and his brain is small in comparison with the bulk of his head, but contrariwise he retains a stolid reliability that keeps him at his job. Once inspanned, he has no desire to kick over the traces or to explore foreign parts; he doesn't bite his trace-mate, or engage in any of those little playful jinks so strangely peculiar to northern horses and northern men, not he … the ox is a good sort, and one who strictly attends to business. He is an animal that walks in the light. There are northern men who will doubtless resent these remarks, so I may as well explain that my comparisons have been prompted by the conduct of "the gang" which offends my sense of decency.

      The "happy low lie down" all over the car in various stages of intoxication. How hideous they are with their unshaven faces, open mouths and yellow teeth! Abroad they are silly; at home they are heart-scalds. As they sprawl over the floor like huge primeval toads, I am consumed by a desire to kick them with my boots. Drunkenness is a disgusting, unfleshed sin.

      And yet, these prostrate fellows are hardly more offensive than those still able to sit up and debate about nothing. As controversialists they remind me of the characters in Alice through the Looking-Glass, who want "to deny something and don't know what it is." When any over-wise babbler feels himself worsted in an argument, he says to his opponent, "You are a liar." While fairly popular, this argument can hardly be considered a logical one. It can be claimed, however, to cover the whole ground, and to be a masterpiece of brevity.

      One fellow, who reeled through the car in a molluscous invertebrate condition, stopped by my seat to tell me he was my friend for life. He was old enough to have known better, and I was glad when a glorious, tall stranger collared the fellow and hurtled him down the aisle like a hockey-player would hurtle the puck.

      Soon afterwards the train's agent, a civil-spoken young man, came into the car and took me into his caboose. I knew something fortunate would happen on this journey. … And to think it came just as my nomad spirit had failed me, and I was utterly crumpled with weariness and hunger.

      I would here desire to reiterate my belief that Providence is a large, serene young man, with a strain of steel in him.