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Into Atlanta station the train at last rolled; the journey to oblivion was all but finished. The restless little city, turmoiling in its boom, swarmed around us; we had to wait half an hour, our gripsacks in our hands, for the surface-car to the prison, three miles or more beyond the town. We awaited it with some impatience such is the unreasonableness of our mortal nature.
Lincoln, in narrating the incident, said: "My heart went up into my mouth, and I started downstairs, where I was told that if a waiter had taken the gripsack I should probably find it in the baggage-room. Going there, I saw a large pile of gripsacks and other baggage, and thought that I discovered mine.
It is often the case here, and we do not know why it may not be in heaven, that the ones that are turned over and shook up, and the dust knocked out of them, and their metaphorical coat tail filled with boots, find that the whirligig of time has placed them above the parties who smote them, and we can readily believe that if Donaldson gets a first-class position of power, above the skies, he will make it decidedly warm for his persecutors when they come up to the desk with their gripsacks and register and ask for a room and a bath, and a fire escape.
They could not arrive within a square of the newspaper-tent, for the crowd around it was packed and dense; so they stopped where there was breathing-space among groups of men who stood with their gripsacks between their feet, waiting for the first word.
According to the old Latin proverb, I presume we should say nothing but good of the dead, but I am here to say that the railroad that knocked my spine loose last week, and compelled me to carry lunch baskets and large Norman two-year-old gripsacks through the gloaming, till my arms hung down to the ground, does not deserve to be treated well, even after death.
These he had wrapped with his parcel. His reason for having things done up in stout paper, and not packed as for travelling, was that the paper could be easily burned afterward, whereas a trunk, boxes, or gripsacks would be more difficult to put out of sight. Everything he bought that day, therefore, was put into wrapping-paper.
Then all of a sudden came a smash. Bills for a huge amount drawn by the governor upon the Treasury were dishonored, land company's credit went up in smoke, a panic followed, values fell with a rush, the frightened immigrants seized their gripsacks and fled to other lands, leaving behind them a good imitation of a solitude, where lately had been a buzzing and populous hive of men.
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