The Birmingham age-herald., 1904-01-31
SHORT STORIES ABOUT
 GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN

self from babyhood At 20 he had practi- cally forced his uncle to give him an in- terest in his bushes worth $10,000 year A year later it was $15000 Ambition drove him the next year to Australia. where, at the age of 22 he founded a great business which cleared $95 GOO the iirst year He started line of sailing boats between Australia and the Atlantic coast of the United States, and intro duced Yankee notions to the antipodes While in the Australian gold field there was revolt of the miners against the authority of Great Britain Train. al- ways radical, sympa thized with the rebels who were attempting to form the ill-fated Five Star republic,H and was offered an election as its first president. This honor he declined.
 Before he was 30 Train was known. honored and feted in most of the capitaIs or Europe. In Paris he met the Spanish queen, Maria Christiana, and he had her | financial assistance in building the Att lantic and Great Western railroad from Erie to the Ohio and Mississippi In 1870 he arrived at Marseilles, France, where he was met by a committee of the com mune, who hailed him as liberator and escorted him to the opera house, where he was greeted by 5000 cheering people. He became for the time being the head mAk1nO reasonable speech to a mob on inc street from the balcony of his hotel a firing squad of soldiers was ordered ont to shoot him. Train pulled the stars and stripes from under his coat, wrapped if around his body and defied them to shoot. The soldiers retired. Then he visited in turn Germany, Russia, Austria and other countries, and everywhere made it point to defy and violate what he con ra1 tttAtr f.rR t..aI I... he was arrested and thrown into jaiI only to be released shortly without serious punishment It was one of his boasts that he had been in jail in every country in Europe.
 In 1877 Train made a VOW to have no more dealings with men, confining his at tention to children. Especially did he re- fuse to shake hands with grown peonIe declaring that contact with them robbed him of what he called his psychic force. For fourteen years he is said to have kept his VOW. spending much of his time sitting on bench in Madison Square. New York, surrounded by the little tots whom he loved. When introduced to a prominent man his method was to shako his own left hand with his right. thus preserving the chain of psychic force He predicted that he would live to be at least 200 years old and was accustomed to re-
 
 years young.'
 In his later days Train always claimed that Mark Twain had copied his name and that the success of the great humorist was entirely due to that fact and to the voluntary assistance which he had given the author of rom Sawyer"
 Once Train was asked why he did not try to set himself right before the public which had come to regard him as a lun- atic.
 My dear sir" he answered, "I am a legal lunatic. How can I place myself right with the people who have pro- nounced me such? What can an agsrega- ton of peanuts know about a cocoanut? The peanuts have never seen a cocoanut before. They can't understand what 1t is They get together and declare by resolu- tion that the cocoanut is only an enlarged peanut. And what recourse is left to the cocoanut? I am cocoanut'
 In 1869 Train began his historic cam paign as an independent candidate for the presidency of the United States. During the next three years he delivered hun dreds of speeches and lectures all over the country He made his last speech of the campaign in Wall street. New York, be-