SOUNDS. 
129 
should have prophesied, once for all, would never get to 
Boston by so prompt a conveyance, are on hand when 
the bell rings. To do things “ railroad fashion” is now 
the by-word ; and it is worth the while to be warned so 
often and so sincerely by any power to get off its track. 
There is no stopping to read the riot act, no firing over 
the heads of the mob, in this case. We have constructed 
a fate, an Atropos , that never turns aside. (Let that 
be the name of your engine.) Men are advertised that 
at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be shot to¬ 
ward particular points of the compass ; yet it interferes 
with no man’s business, and the children go to school on 
the other track. We live the steadier for it. We are 
all educated thus to be sons of Tell. The air is full of 
invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path 
of fate. Keep on your own track, then. 
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise 
and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to 
Jupiter. I see these men every day go about their busi¬ 
ness with more or less courage and content, doing more 
even than they suspect, and perchance better employed 
than they could have consciously devised. I am less 
affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour 
in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and 
cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough 
for their winter quarters; who have not merely the 
three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte 
thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not 
go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm 
sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On 
this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is 
still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled 
tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their 
9 
