Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/343

 *abling the passenger to put the exact fare in the box."

Then I could peer up toward the fare-box and look at the one nickel stranded half-way down its zig-zag chute, and look at the driver, standing on the front platform, slowly rocking from one foot to the other, bundled up in old overcoats, with his cap pulled down and his throat and chin muffled in a repulsive woolen scarf, hoary with the frost of his breath, and nothing of him visible except the shining red point of his frosted nose. His hands, one holding the reins, the other the brake-handle, were lost in the various strata of mittens that marked epochs co-extensive with those of the several overcoats. I had read once in a newspaper of a street-car driver in Indianapolis who, at the end of his run, never moved, but kept right on standing there, and when the barn-boss swore at him, it was found that he was dead, frozen at his post. And I sometimes wondered, as I dwelt on that fascinating horror, if it were possible that sometime, when the car reached the bay, this driver would not be found frozen. Sometimes I expected to be found frozen myself, but nothing exciting ever happened on that journey, and so, somehow, the trips out other streets and other avenues in other cars, remain more pleasantly in the memory, associated with the sunshine and the leafy arch of green overhead, with something of the romance and mystery of untraveled roads in the long vista ahead, while the winter trip down to the superannuated clergyman's is cold and bleak and desolate, perhaps because it had no more interesting