and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown
establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps,
ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a
worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for
it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan
simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men
think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export
ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour,
without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live
like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out
sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work,
but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build
railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven
in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want
railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you
ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one
is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and
they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They
are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid
down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a
rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run
over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the
wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make
a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know
that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers
down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may
sometime get up again.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined
to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves
nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.
As for work, we haven't any of any consequence. We have the Saint Vitus'
dance, and cannot possibly keep our heads still. If I should only give
a few pulls at the parish bell-rope, as for a fire, that is, without
setting the bell, there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of
Concord, notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse
so many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might