tics had not reached
the present state of perfection. We often hear people ask why we haven't
got any Websters in congress now. I can tell you. They are sat down on
long before they get that far along. They are not encouraged to say
radical things and split up the vote.

I will now close, thanking you for your kind preferment. I will ever
strive, while representing you in congress, to retain my following, and
never, by word or deed, endeavor to win fame and applause there at the
expense of votes at home. I care not to be embalmed in the school
speakers and declaimers of future ages, provided my tombstone shall bear
upon it the simple, poetic refrain:

He got there.

BILL NYE ON RAILROADS.

Perhaps there is nothing in the line of discovery and improvement that
has shown more marked progress in the last century than the railway and
its different auxiliaries. When we remember that much less than a
century has passed since the first patent for a locomotive to move upon
a track was issued, where now we have everything that heart can wish,
and, in fact, live better on the road than we do at home, with but
thirty-six hours between New York and Minneapolis, and a gorgeous
parlor, bedroom, and dining-room between Maine and Oregon, with nothing
missing that may go to make life a rich blessing, we are compelled to
express our wonder and admiration.

To Peter Cooper is largely due the boom given to railway business, he
having constructed the first locomotive ever made in this country, and
put it on the Baltimore & Ohio railroad.

The first train ever operated must have been a grand sight. First came
the locomotive, a large Babcock fire-extinguisher on trucks, with a
smoke-stack like a full-blown speaking-tube with a frill around the top;
the engineer at his post in a plug hat, with an umbrella over his head
and his hand on the throttle, borrowing a chew of tobacco now and then
of the farmers who passed him on their way to town. Near him stood the
fireman, now and then bringing in an armful of wood from the fields
through which he passed, and turning the damper in the smoke-stack every
little while so it would draw. Now and then he would go forward and put
a pork-rind on a hot box or pound on the cylinder head to warn people
off the track.

Next comes the tender loaded with nice, white birch wood, an economical
style of fuel because its bark may be easily burned off while the wood
itself will remain uninjured. B