Homeburg Memories | Page 2

I didn't know which one of the thirty tracks my train was on. I guessed it was somewhere to the right, and I guessed wrong. It was twenty-four tracks away to the left, and I couldn't get back in time. So I went into their waiting-room, which is as big as a New England cornfield and has all the benches named for various towns. I had to stand up two hours because I couldn't find the Homeburg bench.
I'm an admirer of big cities, Jim, and I wouldn't have you take a foot off your Woolworth building, or a single crashity!! bang!! out of your subways, but I wish there was a little more coziness in your depots. Why, at Homeburg I'm nearer the train at my house than I am in New York after I've got to the station. It's great to have a depot so big that it takes the place of mountain scenery, but it's hard on the poor traveler, even if it does have all the comforts of away-from-home in it. And then it swallows up things so. It takes away all the pleasure of having a railroad in the town. I suppose five hundred trains come into this station every day, but they're just trains--nothing more. You don't get any fun or information or excitement out of them. You can't even chase them--they bang a gate in your face when you try. I'll bet you don't get as much comfort and fun out of all these five hundred trains, Jim, as we do out of the 4:11 train at Homeburg.
No; it's not any better than your trains. It's not as good. You can't get raw oysters and magazines and individual cocktails and shaves on it. All you can get is cinders and peanuts, and I would advise you, if you were hungry, to eat the former and put the latter in your eye. It's the kind of a train you New Yorkers would ride on and then write home telling about the horrors of travel in the great West. But it means everything to Homeburg. It means a lot more than the half dozen limited trains which roar through our town fifty miles an hour every day and have made us so expert at dodging that we will develop kangaroo legs in another generation. It's our train. Here in New York a hundred trains come in each morning from Chicago, New Orleans, Everywhere and points beyond, and the office-boy next door to the depot doesn't stop licking stamps long enough to look up. But when old Number Eleven, which is its official railroad name, pulls into Homeburg from Chicago each afternoon, loaded with mail, news, passengers, home-comers, adventurers, mysterious strangers, friends, brides, heroes, widows and coffins, you can just bet we're there to see her.
It's the town pastime. We all do it. Whenever a Homeburg man has nothing else to do at four o'clock, he steps over to the depot and joins the long line which leans up against the depot wall and keeps it in place during the crisis. Some of them haven't missed a roll-call in years. Old Bill Dorgan, the drayman, has stood on the platform every day since the line was built, rain or shine. Josh James, the colored porter of the Cosmopolitan Hotel, knows more traveling men than William J. Bryan. If he was absent from his post, the engineer wouldn't know where to stop the train. The old men come crawling down on nice days and sun themselves for an hour before the train arrives. The boys sneak slyly down on their way from school and stand in flocks worshiping the train butcher, who is bigger than the Washington Monument to them. Sometimes a few girls come down too, and hang around, giggling. But that doesn't last long. We won't stand for it in our town. Some missionary tells the girls' parents, and then they suddenly disappear from the ranks and look pouty and insulted for a month, and we know, without being told, that a couple of grown-up young ladies of sixteen or more have been spanked in the good old-fashioned way. Homeburg is a good town, and it makes its girls behave even if it has to half kill them.
You haven't any idea, Jim, how much bustle and noise and excitement and general enthusiasm a passenger train can put into a small town for a few minutes. Just imagine yourself in Homeburg on a cold winter afternoon. It's four o'clock. The sun has stood the climate as long as it can and is getting ready to duck for shelter behind the dreary fields to the west. If you ran an automobile a mile a minute down the walk on Main Street you wouldn't have to toot for a