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Updated: May 18, 2025
"They are terrapin-buzzards!" exclaimed my woman child, with deep conviction. I shuddered fittingly at the violence of her speech. Before we had gone far the train-boy deserted his post and came running after us. "John B. Gough!" he exclaimed bitterly profanely. "He's swearing," warned his sister. "Look out, Uncle Maje, or he'll say 'Gamboge' next."
Shag, you rascal, look here! Have you been buying a newspaper?" "Ye ye yes, sah, Colonel, I has! But I done bought it fo' mahse'f. Deed an' I wasn't goin' t' let yo' hab so much as a snift at it, Colonel! De train-boy, whut yo' gib a dollar t', he handed it t' me when I was gittin' off. It's one ob de papers gotten out right yeah in dis city, an' " "Well, out with it, Shag!
The individual known by the title of "train-boy" is also worth some study. He is oftentimes a grown-up man, but more frequently a most precocious boy; he is the agent for some enterprising house in Chicago, New York, or Philadelphia, or some other large town, and his aim is to dispose of a very miscellaneous collection of mental and bodily nourishment.
It would be fine, riding off on the big train. Probably they would never come back to this town, but sleep on their big engine every night; and every day, from the toothsome dainties of the train-boy Sullivan's basket, they would "eat all they could hold." The elder Sullivan, aged eight, he of the artistic temperament, here soared dizzily into the farthest ether of romance.
Here the tropics ended and the train began to climb, so slowly we could have stepped off anywhere, the vegetation visibly changing in character with every mile. On the now crowded platform two natives alternately ordered American beer of the train-boy, at $5 a bottle! At Palin we were assailed by tattered vendors of all manner of fruit, enormous pineapples selling for sixty guatemalteco cents.
The pleasant torpor didn't last long, because presently, the rhythmic thud of the wheels began singing to him the same damned tune that had dogged his footsteps earlier that morning: "I'm all alone, you're all alone; come on, let's be lonesome together." This was intolerable! To break it up, he bought a magazine from the train-boy and tried to read.
At the Union Depot in Chicago, two weeks later, a small, nervous lady fluttered uncertainly from one door to another. She wore a short, brown coat suit of classic severity, and a felt hat which was fastened under her smoothly braided hair by a narrow elastic band. On her fourth trip to the main entrance she stopped a train-boy.
He opened it and was sharing it with his son when the train-boy came back, and metallically, like a part of the machinery, demanded, "Ten cents!" The German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated, "Ten cents! ten cents!" with tiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled.
Knowin' that there wuz no eatin'-house this side of Bowieville, I jest called the train-boy, 'nd says I to him: "Hev you got any victuals that will do for a baby?" "How is oranges 'nd bananas?" says he. "That ought to do," says I. "Jist do up a dozen uv your best oranges 'nd a dozen uv your best bananas 'nd take 'em over to that baby with my complerments."
There had been clamors for the positions of honor, and she, from weakness of sex, had been overborne. She, whose heart cried out for the distinction of train-boy, conductor, engineer, brakeman, or fireman, in the order named, had been forced into the only degrading post in the game a mere passenger without voice or office in those delicate feats of administration.
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