The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1877-09-22
A Human Whirlpool.

BENZ. F. TAYLOR, the poet, thus char
acteristically describes an everyday
scene at the railroad depot in Omaha on
the departure of the train for San Fran
cisco:
The depot bubbles and boils like
caldron. The engine comes changing
down with cloud and rush. People
climb on and climb off the laden cars
crazier than ever. They are giving old
ladies lift from behind. They are tug
ging up carpet-bags like cats with their
last kittens. They are all colors with
excitement and hurry. 1t strikes you
very queerly that everybody is going and
nobody staying. The demon of unrest
is the reigning king. "Long live the
king" for life is motion. Still life is
deaths first cousin. A Babel of trunks
is surging toward the baggage cars.
Trunks are piled like dromedaries.
There's the Saratoga that might be lived
in if it only had chimney, and the IRON
bound chest of the mistietoe- bough
tragedy, and the dapper sachel, as sleek
and black as wet mink, and the little
brindled-hair trunk with its brazen let
tering of nail heads, and the canvas sack
as rusty as an elephant. And so they
tumble aboard with an infinite Jingle of
cheeks, an acrobatic, jolly troupe, the
hearts delight of the trunk-makers. You
see your own property, bought new for
the occasion, rolling over and over cor
ner-wiSe like possessed porpoise. Alasl
for any pigments or unguents or dilu-
lions or perfumes that may break loose
in that somerset, and make colored maps
of the five continents upon your wedding
vest or your snowy wrapper. Last, the
leather purses of the United States mail
fly from the red wagons like chatf from
fanning-mill. The engines steam and
Impotence are blown off in whistle to-
gether. 1t splits spitetully on one side
and then the other, like schoolboy out
of the corners of his mouth.
And amid the whirl of the maelstrom
for, if Norway has none, at least
Omaha has one there are only two
things that are quiet and serene. The
one is youthful descendant of Ham,
with heel like the head of clawham-
mer-five claws instead of pair-lying
on trunk upon a stomach that, like an
angleworm's, pervades the whole phvsi-
cal man, and the descendant turned up
at both ends, like rampant mud turtle,
his mouth full of ivory and his eyes
round with content.
The other is " the last man"-not
MOntgomery's, but an earlier product
that man in gray, in silk cap, and TAX
ing lazy whitts at cigar that has about
crumbled to ashes. He is as calm as the
Sphinx, but not quite so grand nor so
grim. He is going to San Francisco
when-the train goes, and he patiently
bides his time. He is an old traveller,
and watches with an amused eye the
human vortex. He has seen it before at
Gibraltar, at Canton, and now at Omaha.
AT last the conductor gives the word
" All aboard" signals with wave of
his hand the engineer who has been lean
ing like Lots wife with his head over his
shoulders, the bell lurches from side to
side with clang, your last man gives
his cigar careless toss and swings him
self upon the rear platform, and the train
with its black banners and white flung
aloft pulls out, and we are off for the
plains and deserts, and the gorges and
the mountains, and the Golden Gate and
the Western sea.
Good-by for a while to the rivers that
flow toward sunrise. For once, we give
" the Star of Empire" that has been TAX
ing its westward way for these half
dozen generations stern chase, for, ac-
cording to the saying of the blue rounda-
bouts, stern chase is long chase"