38 AUTUMN NOTES IN IOWA 



writer vaguely remembers a scene in his early 

 boyhood when the people of his town, with the 

 famous man for whom it w^as named, gathered one 

 day to greet the first train to arrive from the 

 north. In those remote days some of the engines 

 were named instead of numbered, and appeared 

 in a certain poetic personal character to the vil- 

 lage lads. How often one boy cried out to an- 

 other, ''There's 'C. C. Oilman' just coming in" — 

 or perhaps it was "going for good." Some years 

 the road, like others, suffered much from flooded 

 streams. Once at least the restive waters surged 

 far beyond their proper channel till they stood — 

 was it "up to the car window^s"? — high over the 

 tracks at the Marshalltown station. Just before 

 the St. Ijouis Exposition, much regrading was 

 done along certain portions of the road. The 

 Italian laborers were picturesque figures, and 

 their bake-ovens, dug into the clay banks of the 

 cuts, looked curiously foreign and primitive. Cur- 

 tis, who had spent a year or more in Italy, once 

 tried to get some of the workmen to talk in their 

 native Neapolitan, but for some reason conversa- 

 tion seemed a lost — or concealed — art with them 

 then and there. 



Today in the northern pastures the cattle stood 

 in still groups, languidly, under the scrub oaks; 

 farther south they had waded deep into the slug- 

 gish sloughs. For long distances the burning piles 



