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Updated: June 19, 2025
He said, "Oh, yes yes, engine," when she mentioned the locomotive, and he apparently prized beyond its worth the word cow-catcher, a fixture which Lydia said was wanting to the European locomotive, and left it very stubby. He asked her if she would allow him to set it down; and he entered the word in his note-book, with several other idioms she had used.
"Cow-catcher," I suggested eagerly, and we continued in this ecstatic duet for some time. Then I asked him what it was all about, and he told me. He explained the thing eloquently and at length. "The funny part of it is," he said, "that the thing isn't new at all. It's been talked about ever since I was a boy, and long before. There is always a notion that the razor might be done without somehow.
It carries the usual "cow-catcher" in front of the locomotive, but this is mere ostentation. It ought to be attached to the rear car, where it could do some good; but instead, no provision is made there for the protection of the traveling public, and hence it is not a matter of surprise that cows so frequently climb aboard that train and among the passengers.
"Kin you keep your feet through the West River Bridge, with the narrer-gage comin' in on one side, an' the Montreal flyer the other, an' the old bridge teeterin' between?" said the Deacon. "Kin you put your nose down on the cow-catcher of a locomotive when you're waitin' at the depot an' let 'em play 'Curfew shall not ring to-night' with the big brass bell?"
The track led down-grade, and the engineers, who had nursed the great machines up the long climb to the summit, were now racing them down hill. Waving the lantern Geoffrey stood with a foot on one of the rails and every sense intent, until the first engine's cow-catcher was almost upon him.
A heavy Mogul freight, with a short cow-catcher and a fire-box that came down within three inches of the rail, began the impolite game, speaking to a Pittsburgh Consolidation, who was visiting. "Where did this thing blow in from?" he asked, with a dreamy puff of light steam. "it's all I can do to keep track of our makes," was the answer, "without lookin' after your back-numbers.
If a granger let his fence fall down and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with a locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a claim for the destruction of a prize-winning animal with a record as an amazing milker; also he added something for damage to the feelings of the family in the loss of a household pet.
Thousands of land-crabs, painted red and black and yellow, scrambled with a rattle like dead men's bones across the rails to be crushed by the hundreds under the wheels of the Juggernaut; great lizards ran from sunny rocks at the sound of their approach, and a deer bounded across the tracks fifty feet in front of the cow-catcher.
They ought to hire him to sit on the cow-catcher foggy nights.... I wouldn't like to pay for all the paint it took to color it.... Plain whiskey, I guess. You can see what you are coming to if you don't look out.... What's the matter with that baby back there? Is the woman lynching it, or is it lynching the woman?... It's not, either. It's just like your high tenor, singing the Soldier's Farewell.
The Canadian Pacific Railway have not had experience before this autumn of the effect of heavy rains on their roads, bridges, &c., and things have sometimes come to grief in consequence; some bridges are very good and not temporary. Later. Since writing the foregoing, John and E and Hedley went off on the cow-catcher of an engine for two or three miles excursion!
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