LIFE ON THE PACIFIC RAILWAY. ID 



or funnel of the locomotive, while a number of them held on to the other end of the rope. 

 The engine went on its way unharmed ; but i is said that the eccentric gymnastics performed 

 by the Indians,, as they were pulled at twenty-five miles an hour over the rocks and boulders 

 at the side of the track, were more amusing to the passengers than to themselves. 



Most readers will have heard of the celebrated " Cape Horn/' high up among the 

 Sierra Nevada mountains, where the Central Pacific Railway rounds the edge of a fearful 

 cliff. The traveller is there between six and seven thousand feet above the sea level ; and 

 at the particular point of which mention is now made there is a precipice descending almost 

 perpendicularly to a depth of fifteen hundred feet. Above, again, rise the walls of the 

 same rocky projection to a still greater height. The sublimity of the spot is undoubted, 

 but as regards the passengers, the ridiculous too often appears upon the scene. Most ladies 

 and many timid men audibly shudder at this juncture, and after taking a hasty glance 

 downwards at the turbulent Truckee River dashing round the base of the precipice, retire to 

 the other side of the carriage, where there is nothing but the prospect of a rough-hewn 

 rocky wall a foot or so off the carriages. Is it with the idea of ballasting the train? 

 Perhaps like the ostrich, they think themselves out of danger, when danger is hidden ! 



Not very far from the above spot, on the western side of the mountains, where the 

 grades are particularly steep, an accident occurred a few years ago which had more of the 

 comic element than the serious. A train, proceeding at a rapid rate, broke in two, the 

 locomotive and several carriages dashing on, while the second half of the train followed at 

 slower speed. At length the foremost car of this part of the train left the rails, and 

 breaking off from the couplings, turned bottom upwards on the embankment, just coming 

 to an anchor at the edge of a ravine, into which, had it fallen, no one could have been, 

 saved. A husband of Falstaffian proportions was in one of the foremost carriages which 

 had proceeded with the locomotive, and as soon as they stopped he scrambled off, running 

 back to the scene of the accident, hurrying and stumbling and shinning himself on and 

 over the rough roadway and obtrusive sleepers, for his wife was in one of the hindmost cars, 

 and he feared the worst. At last he approached the wreck, where his wife was seen stand- 

 ing, calmly waving a handkerchief, she having climbed out through one of the windows, 

 almost unhurt. She had just been tending the one damaged person of the whole number. 

 That individual, in his anxiety to grasp something as the carriage overturned, had seized on 

 the hot stove, and was badly, though not seriously, burned. 



Not altogether a nuisance is an institution inseparably connected with American 

 trains the peripatetic boy who offers you one minute a newspaper, the next a novel, and 

 then anything from a cigar or a box of sweetmeats to a "prize package." These latter 

 are of all values, from a twenty-five cent package of stationery to a bound book at a dollar 

 and a half, about one in a hundred of which may possibly contain a money prize. The 

 writer had been a good customer as regards paper-covered novels, and his plan was to 

 sell the books back at half-price, then purchasing a new story, and this, of course, suited the 

 boys well enough. In consequence of these and other purchases, he was one day allowed 

 1o win a five-dollar "greenback" in a prize package. He was somewhat annoyed afterwards 

 to find that he had been used really as the "decoy duck." The news of his winnings 

 flew through the carriage, and even through the train, and the enterprising youngster soon 



