But neither in Canada nor elsewhere is it upon the grand routes that glimpses can be had of interior life and character.  Primitive simplicity is altogether incompatible with railroads.  The boy who resides near a station is quite an old man, compared with any average boy taken from the sequestered clearings ten miles back:  he may be a worse kind of boy, or he may be a better, but he isn’t the same kind, at any rate.  Of girls it is more difficult to speak with confidence in the present era,—­hooped skirts having pretty nearly assimilated them everywhere; but I have noticed that they are less ingenuous along railroads than in secluded districts, and their parents more suspicious,—­a fact which makes railroad-vicinities inferior places to dwell in, compared to those that are rural and remote from the demoralizing influences of up and down trains.

I do not aver that the railroad is devoid of a kind of poetry of its own,—­the same kind of sentiment, nearly, that resides about anvils and smelting-furnaces in the Hartz Mountains and in the great coal-districts:  an infernal kind of sentiment, for the most part, being inseparable from burning fiery furnaces and grime; as in “Fridolin,” and in the “Song of the Bell,” and in the “Forging of the Anchor.”  Once, particularly, in travelling by rail, did I experience the mysterious glamour that seems to hang round iron more than about any other metal.  It was past midnight; and on waking up after a sleep of some hours, I found myself alone in the long car, which had come to a stand-still while I slept.  The stillness of the night was broken at intervals by a short, loud boom, as of an iron bell ringing up some terrible domestic from the incomprehensible unseen.  On looking out of the window, I saw by some dim lamp-light that we were alone in an immense iron hall; we, I say, for there was a ponderous, grimy being darkly visible to me, whose gigantic shadow made terrible gestures upon the walls and among the great iron girders of the roof, as he moved slowly along the train, striking the wheels with a heavy sledge-hammer as he went.  Of course there was nothing unusual in such a proceeding, the object of which was, probably, to ascertain something connected with the condition of the rolling stock; but there was a kind of awful poetry in the toll of the iron bell, which ran, and reverberated, and tingled among the iron ribs in the building, making them all sing as if they were things of flesh and blood, with plenty of iron in the latter, which is reckoned to be conducive to robust health.

But the romance of rolling stock has yet to be disengaged, and the inspired conductor or bardic baggage-master destined to do that is yet in the shell.  May he long remain there!