Page:Rural Studies - Mitchell - 1867.djvu/53

ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 35 Lackland Makes a Beginning.

My friend Lackland—as I suspected he would—has purchased a little place of two and a half acres, some thirty or forty miles from the city by the New Haven railway. He makes his trips to and fro with a little badly-disguised fear of decayed " sleepers," it is true; and suffers from the still more frequent embarrassment of riding upon his feet all the seats being occupied, and the company being unfortunately too much straitened in their circumstances to add to the number of their carriages. He was disposed to resent such things at the start, and was even stirred into writing a brief and indignant appeal to an independent morning journal; but upon being answered by an attorney for the company or a road commissioner, who called him names and abused him, as if he had been a witness before a court of justice, he subsided into that meek respect for corporations, and awe of all their procedure, which are the characteristics of a good American citizen, and of most well-ordered newspapers.

New Yorkers learn how to bear such things; there is no better schooling for submission than a two or three years course of travel upon the city railways; Lackland is submissive. And after a