The
pace is not such as to make much amends: from twenty to twenty-five
miles an hour is the outside speed even of expresses: and on many lines
you ought to calculate the probabilities of arrival by anything rather
than the time-tables. Collisions, however, are certainly rare; the most
common accident is when the train breaks through one of the crazy wooden
bridges, or, obeying the direction of some playfully eccentric
pointsman, plunges headlong over an embankment into some peaceful valley
below. The steam-signals are very peculiar; the engine never whistles,
but indulges in a prolonged bellow, very like the hideous sounds emitted
by that hideous semi-brute, yclept the Gong-Donkey, who used to haunt
our race-courses some years ago--making weak-minded men start, and
strong-minded women scream with his unearthly roaring. When I first
heard the hoarse warning-note boom through the night, a shudder of
reminiscence came over me, for I used to shrink from that awful creature
with a repugnance such as I never felt for any other living thing.
All the weariness of the long night-journey will not prevent a traveler
from appreciating the superb Hudson, along whose banks the last part of
the road, from Albany, is carried. You are seldom out of sight of the
Caatskill range--blue in the distance or dark in the foreground--but the
crowning glory of the river are the old cliffs, where the rock soars up
sheer from the water's edge, with no more vegetation on its face than
will grow in the crevices of ancient walls.
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