A promise was being kept.  The bay horse started three times to bolt from the line of march, and this was probably because its rider was better used to the Pompeian-red broiler car than to a Pompeian-red bay mare.  But these were mere trifles.  Despite them—­partly because of them perhaps—­the younger brethren at the terminals were no longer to address the veteran from the Congressional merely as Mr. Forrest.  He was General Forrest now—­a title he bears proudly and which he will carry with him all the long years of his life.

What becomes of the older porters?

Sometimes, when the rush of the fast trains, the broken nights, the exposure and the hard, hard work begin to be too much for even sturdy Afric frames, they go to the “super” and beg for the “sick man’s run”—­a leisurely sixty or a hundred miles a day on a parlor car, perhaps on a side line where travel is light and the parlor car is a sort of sentimental frippery; probably one of the old wooden cars:  the Alicia, or the Lucille, or the Celeste, still vain in bay windows and grilles, and abundant in carvings.  For a sentimental frippery may be given a feminine name and may bear her years gracefully—­even though she does creak in all her hundred joints when the track is the least bit uneven.

As to the sick man’s tips, the gratuity is no less a matter of keen interest and doubt at sixty than it is at twenty-six.  And though there is a smile under that clean mat of kinky white hair, it is not all habit—­some of it is still anticipation.  But quarters and half dollars do not come so easily to the old man in the parlor car as to his younger brother on the sleepers, or those elect who have the smokers on the fat runs.  To the old men come dimes instead—­some of them miserable affairs bearing on their worn faces the faint presentments of the ruler on the north side of Lake Erie and hardly redeemable in Baltimore or Cincinnati.  Yet even these are hardly to be scorned—­when one is sixty.

After the sick man’s job?  Perhaps a sandy farm on a Carolina hillside, where an old man may sit and nod in the warm sun, and dream of the days when steel cars were new—­perhaps of the days when the platform-vestibule first went bounding over the rails—­may dream and nod; and then, in his waking moments, stir the pickaninnies to the glories of a career on a fast train and a fat run.  For if it is true that any white boy has the potential opportunity of becoming President of the United States, it is equally true that any black boy may become the Autocrat of the Pullman Car.

* * * * *

(The Independent)

THE GENTLE ART OF BLOWING BOTTLES
And the Story of How Sand is Melted into Glass

BY F. GREGORY HARTSWICK