Homeburg Memories | Page 6

for a day
or two and revisit the scenes of his boyhood, he came on Number
Eleven of course. The train hung around while the band played two
selections and the mayor gave an address of welcome. That was her
longest visit in Homeburg.
The old train even bursts into local politics and social affairs now and
then. It managed to jump the 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