"All charcoal and puddles," said a fellow-traveller disparagingly; "I'm very glad we're going so fast through it."
Now for my own part I think it looks very uncivil of a train to go with a screech through a station without stopping, and I always wish I could say something in the way of an apology to the station-master for the train's bad manners. No doubt people who live in very small places get accustomed to trains rushing past their platforms without stopping even to say "By your leave." But at first it must be rather painful. At least I should think it was. On the other hand, the people "in the mofussil" (which is the Anglo-Indian for "all the country outside one's own town") did not pay much attention to our train. Everybody went about their several works for all the world as if we were not flashing by. Even the dogs trotted about indifferently, without even so much as noticing us, except occasionally some distant mongrel, who barked at the train as if it was a stray bullock, and smiled complacently upon the adjoining landscape when he found how thoroughly he had frightened it away.
There seemed to me a curious dearth of small wild life. The English "country" is so full of birds that all others seem, by comparison, birdles. Once, I saw a russet-winged hawk hovering over a copse of water-oak as if it saw something worth eating there; once, too, I saw a blue-bird brighten a clump of cedars. Now and again a vagabond crow drifted across the sky. But, as compared with Europe or parts of the East which I know best, bird-life was very scanty.
And presently Philadelphia came sliding along to meet us with a stately decorum of metalled roads and well-kept public grounds, and we stopped for the first of the twelve halts, worth calling such, which I had to make in the 3000 miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
How treacherously the trains in America start! There is no warning given, so far as an ordinary passenger can see, that the start is under contemplation, and it takes him by surprise. The American understands that "All aboard" means "If you don't jump up at once you'll be left behind." But to those accustomed to a "first" and a "second" and a "third" bell--and accustomed, too, not to get up even then until the guard has begged them as a personal favour to take their seats--the sudden departure of the American locomotive presents itself as a rather shabby sort of practical joke.