s were on display.

As I stood gazing at that worn and rusty bar of iron with its single
bent and rusty spike, I was whisked back across the years by some
strange trick of memory and I saw, instead, a dimly lighted sick room,
on a hot summer night--myself a little sufferer, and sitting beside me,
fanning my fevered brow, my beloved father, who, notwithstanding the
fatigue of a heavy and exacting practice sat thus night after night,
soothing me to sleep by telling me entertaining stories of his youth,
and as he was born one hundred and one years ago, the strange
experiences of his boyhood were thrilling indeed to his youthful adorer.

And so, I saw in my mind's eye that familiar room of my childhood--the
open window, the breezes blowing the curtains to and fro, the moonlight
casting strange shadows on the terrace outside, and I heard again that
voice which has meant so much to me telling how "when the first railroad
started" and all the people had gathered from far and near "to witness
its departure," he and a group of fellow students from Transylvania
University, mounted on fast horses, galloped ahead "to see if the
Wonderful Thing could round the curve without running off the track";
and how "it came in sight, thundering along, puffing out clouds of black
smoke, the engineer adding to the confusion by incessantly blowing his
shrill whistle," all of which so terrified his horse, he had great
difficulty in keeping his seat, but yet, how tremendously impressed he
was by the "gallant way in which the gentlemen seated in the coach
raised their stovepipe hats in greeting as they passed by like a streak
of lightning."

He said the locomotive had been invented by his old friend Tom Barlow,
in whose honor he had named our Tom Barlow, his favorite race horse.

He also said the old locomotive looked like a "thresher engine mounted
on a flat car," and that the coach was for all the world like an
"omnibus with seats on top as well as inside," and furthermore, he
added, when it had been proved safe he rode upon it himself, and then
"rode home on horseback" (a distance of thirty miles) to tell his mother
all about it.

And this was all that was left of that Wonderful Thing, this bit of
scrap iron and a few stone sills!

Finding myself gazing vacantly at that relic of the Past, and that
people were noting my abstraction, I hastily gathered myself together
and crossing the street to our beautiful Union Station, I started
on my j