The train
hung around while the band played two selections and the mayor gave an
address of welcome. That was her longest visit in Homeburg.

The old train even bursts into local politics and social affairs now and
then. It managed to jump the track in the campaign of '96, leaving four
distinguished Democratic speakers, fizzing with oratory, in the
cornfields, and ruining the only rally the Dems attempted to pull off.
And it took DeLancey Payley down after all the rest of the town had
failed, in a manner which kept us tearful with delight for a week.
DeLancey was sequestered in an Eastern college by his loving parents,
and when he was graduated he came home and started an exclusive circle
composed mostly of himself. He was unapproachably haughty, until one day
he accompanied a proud beauty, who was visiting the Singers (our other
hothouse family) to Number Eleven, and lingered too long after the train
started. DeLancey got off, but in doing so he performed a variety of
difficult and instructive feats of balancing on his ear which were
viewed by a large audience with terrific enthusiasm. When DeLancey was
haughty after that, we always praised this feat, and you'd be surprised
to see how soon he got his nose down out of the zenith.

Every day old Number Eleven brings in its mail-bag full of hopes and
triumphs, of good news, bad news, and tragedy. Every day it brings the
new ideas from the world outside and the latest wrinkles in hanging on
to this whirling old sphere in a pleasant and successful manner. We get
our styles from the Chicago men who step off of its platforms and tarry
with us. We send our brides off on it with an entire change of bill at
each performance. We get our peeps into wonderland and romance and
comedy from the theatrical troupes which straggle out of its cars and
rush to the baggage car to make sure that no varlet has attached their
trunks since the last stop. It is the magic carpet which carries our
youth forth into the great world to wonder and learn and prevail. And
now and then it is the kindly beast of burden who brings back some old
playmate, done with weariness and striving, and coming home to rest in
our cemetery beyond the south hill.

No, Jim, your thousand trains a day, with their parlor cars, bathrooms,
barber shops and libraries, are all right, but they're just trains.
Number Eleven is a whole lot more than a train. It is the world come to
visit us once a day--a moving picture of life