the possession of the road and was
in use all day any repairs on the hard-worked object had to be made at
night."

"Humph!" ejaculated Stephen.

"Nevertheless 'The Best Friend' might have gone on its way prosperously
had it not been for the ignorance of those who ran it. The engineer, to
be sure, understood more or less about a steam locomotive although he
was none too wise; but the fireman, unfortunately, understood next to
nothing, and one day, on being left alone in the cab and seeing the
steam escaping from the safety valve, he conceived the notion that a
leak was causing unnecessary waste. Therefore he securely screwed up the
space through which the steam had been issuing, and to make prevention
more certain he himself, a large and heavy man, sat down on the escape
valve."

"And presto!" exclaimed Steve, rubbing his hands.

"Exactly so! Presto, indeed! Figuratively speaking, he blew sky-high and
'The Best Friend' with him," replied Mr. Tolman. "It was an unfortunate
happening, too, for people were still ill-informed about the uses of
steam and very nervous about its mysterious power and this accident only
served to make them more so. For some time afterward many persons
refused to patronize the railroad in spite of all the authorities could
do to soothe them. In time, however, the public calmed down, although in
order to reassure them it was found necessary to put a car heaped with
bales of cotton between them and the engine, not only to conceal the
monster from their view but also to convince them that it was some
distance away. Whether they also had a vague notion that in case they
went skyward the cotton might soften their fall when they came down, I
do not know."

"Railroading certainly had its troubles, didn't it?" Steve commented
with amusement.

"It certainly had, especially in our own country," was the reply. "In
England Stephenson and other experimenters like him had materials at
hand which to some extent served their purpose; moreover, thanks to Watt
and other inventors, there were definite scientific ideas to work from.
But in America the successful railroad which might serve as a model was
unknown. Therefore for some time English engines continued to be shipped
across the sea, and even then it was a long time before our American
engineers understood much about their mechanism. Only by means of
repeated experiments, first in one part of the country and then in
another, did our American railroads,