Homeburg Memories | Page 6

track in the campaign of '96, leaving four distinguished Democratic speakers, fizzing with oratory, in the cornfields, and ruining the only rally the Dems attempted to pull off. And it took DeLancey Payley down after all the rest of the town had failed, in a manner which kept us tearful with delight for a week. DeLancey was sequestered in an Eastern college by his loving parents, and when he was graduated he came home and started an exclusive circle composed mostly of himself. He was unapproachably haughty, until one day he accompanied a proud beauty, who was visiting the Singers (our other hothouse family) to Number Eleven, and lingered too long after the train started. DeLancey got off, but in doing so he performed a variety of difficult and instructive feats of balancing on his ear which were viewed by a large audience with terrific enthusiasm. When DeLancey was haughty after that, we always praised this feat, and you'd be surprised to see how soon he got his nose down out of the zenith.
Every day old Number Eleven brings in its mail-bag full of hopes and triumphs, of good news, bad news, and tragedy. Every day it brings the new ideas from the world outside and the latest wrinkles in hanging on to this whirling old sphere in a pleasant and successful manner. We get our styles from the Chicago men who step off of its platforms and tarry with us. We send our brides off on it with an entire change of bill at each performance. We get our peeps into wonderland and romance and comedy from the theatrical troupes which straggle out of its cars and rush to the baggage car to make sure that no varlet has attached their trunks since the last stop. It is the magic carpet which carries our youth forth into the great world to wonder and learn and prevail. And now and then it is the kindly beast of burden who brings back some old playmate, done with weariness and striving, and coming home to rest in our cemetery beyond the south hill.
No, Jim, your thousand trains a day, with their parlor cars, bathrooms, barber shops and libraries, are all right, but they're just trains. Number Eleven is a whole lot more than a train. It is the world come to visit us once a day--a moving picture of life which we enjoyed long before Edison took out his patent. Do you wonder that it makes me sad to see so many perfectly good trains going to waste in this roofed-over township of yours? Take me out of it, please.

II
THE FRIENDLY FIRE-FIEND
The Joys of Fighting Him with a Volunteer Fire Department
Hello! Here comes the fire department! Watch the people swarm! Uumpp! Ouch! Excuse me for living. This is no place for a peaceable spectator. I'm going to cast anchor in this doorway until the mob gets past.
No, thank you. I'll not join the Marathon. But you don't know how homesick and happy it makes me to see this crowd run! I've been in New York a week now, and honestly this is almost the first really human impulse I've seen a citizen give way to. Until this minute I've felt as if I were a hundred thousand miles from Homeburg, with all train service suspended for the winter. If I could find the man who stepped on my heels while chasing that engine, I'd thank him and ask him what volunteer fire department he used to run with. See 'em scramble.
Whoop! Here comes the hook-and-ladder truck! This is nothing but Homeburg on a big scale. I'm beginning to envy you city chaps now. That makes the fourth engine that's come past. You get more for your money than we do. Look at that chief hurdling curbstones in his little red wagon. If Homeburg ever gets big enough to have a chief's wagon, I'll suffocate with pride.
I see it's the same old story. Fire's all out. It always is by the time you've run nine blocks. Watch the racers coming back. Stung, every one of them--gold-bricked. There's a fat fellow who's run half a mile, I'll bet. If his tongue hung out any farther, he'd trip up on it. But he'll do it again next time. They all do. Learning to stop running to fires is as hard as learning to stop buying mining-stock in the West. And it's just as big a swindle too. The returns from running to fires are marvelously small. They tell me that a hundred million dollars a year goes up in flames in this country. I don't believe it. If it does, I want to know who gets to see all the fun. I don't.
I've run to fires all my life, until lately, and I've drawn about