one of our Western 'Guls could smear all over the track and never know there'd been an accident, but, man! she looked big to me. And the hostler! Well, I classed him with the lad that hooked half-dollars out of the air at the Sunday-school show, and took a rabbit out of Judge Smalley's hat. But the hostler was a still more wonderful man. I tried to figure if he'd ever speak to me, and what I should do if he did. Every time I got the chores done early, I skipped it over to the railroad, till finally the hostler he sees a long-legged boy eating him with his eyes, and he says:

"Hello, bub!"

I scuffed my feet and said, "Good morning."

The hostler spit careful over the top of the switch and says, with one eye shut, "Like a ride?"

Well!!

Howsomever, it seemed manners to me to refuse all pleasant propositions, so I said "no" and prepared to slide away. But he was a wise man.

"Better come down to the shed," he says. So I climbed aboard with no more talk.

"This is the throttle," says he. "You pull that and she goes: try it."

Notwithstanding I expected that engine to explode and scatter us the minute a strange hand was laid on her, I wrastled my nerve together and moved the lever a tiny bit. "Chow!" says the old engine, "Chow-chow-chow!" and I near had a fit with pride and scaredness. It is a great sensation to hold them big critters under your hand. I never knew an engineer yet that got rid of it entirely.

So there was me, white in the face with grandeur, hogging the engine into the shed. I couldn't sleep much that night. When I did doze off, it was to travel a great many miles a minute on a road-bed laid flat against the side of a mountain, with an engine that had wash-tubs for drivers, and was run by winding up by a crank, like the old clock in the hall. Lord! how I whizzed around the turns! Grinding away like a lunatic, until the road ended—just ended, that's all, and off we went into the air. From that on I had business at the railroad every evening I could get off.

I went over to my engine one night. There wasn't a soul around. My friend was as ingenious a Yank as ever helped make this world a factory. He'd got up a scheme for a brake, almost the identical thing with the air-brake 

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