The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46;
the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each;
and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that
appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!
You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds.
The railroads are good enough for me.
And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than
you can help; but when you have GOT to stay at home a while,
buy a package of those insurance tickets and sit up nights.
You cannot be too cautious.
[One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner
recorded at the top of this sketch.]
The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble
more than is fair about railroad management in the United States.
When we consider that every day and night of the year full fourteen
thousand railway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life
and armed with death, go thundering over the land, the marvel is,
NOT that they kill three hundred human beings in a twelvemonth,
but that they do not kill three hundred times three hundred!
PORTRAIT OF KING WILLIAM III
I never can look at those periodical portraits in THE GALAXY magazine
without feeling a wild, tempestuous ambition to be an artist.
I have seen thousands and thousands of pictures in my time
--acres of them here and leagues of them in the galleries of Europe
--but never any that moved me as these portraits do.
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