and weather.  Yes, it would be pleasant to be an engine-driver, especially on such a day as this.  Pleasant to look at the great train of carriages standing in the station before starting:  to see the piles of luggage going up through the exertions of hot porters:  to see the numbers of passengers, old and young, cool and flurried, with their wraps, their newspapers, their books, at length arranged in the soft, roomy interiors; and then the sense of power, when by the touch of a couple of fingers upon the lever, you make the whole mass of luggage, of life, of human interests and cares, start gently into motion; till, gathering speed as it goes, it tears through the green stillness of the summer noon, amid daisied fields, through little woody dells, through clumps of great forest-trees, within sight of quiet old manor houses, across little noisy brooks and fair broad rivers, beside churchyard walls and grey ivied churches, alongside of roads where you see the pretty phaeton, the lordly coach, the lumbering waggon, and get glimpses that suggest a whole picture of the little life of numbers of your fellow-men, each with heart and mind and concerns and fears very like your own.  Yes, my friend, if you rejoice in fair scenery, if you sympathize with all modes of human life—­if you have some little turn for mechanics, for neatness and accuracy, for that which faithfully does the work it was made to do, and neither less nor more:  retain it in your mind as an ultimate end, that you may one day drive a locomotive engine.  You need not of necessity become greasy of aspect; neither need you become black.  I never have known more tidy, neat, accurate, intelligent, sharp, punctual, responsible, God-fearing, and truly respectable men, than certain engine-drivers.

Remember the engine must be a locomotive engine.  Your taste for scenery and life will not be gratified by employment on a stationary one.  And it is fearfully hot work on a summer day to take charge of a stationary steam-engine; while (perhaps you would not think it) to drive a locomotive is perfectly cool work.  You never feel, in that rapid motion, the raging flame that is doing its work so near you.  The driver of the express train may be a man of large sympathies, of cheerful heart, of tolerant views; the man in charge of the engine of a coal-pit or factory, even of a steam-ship, is apt to acquire contracted ways of thinking, and to become somewhat cynical and gloomy in his ideas as to the possible amelioration of society.  It cannot be a pleasing employment, one would think, on a day like this, to sit and watch a great engine fire, and mend it when needful.  That occupation would not be healthful, either to mind or body.  I dare say you remember the striking and beautiful description in Mr. Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, of a man who had watched and fed a furnace-fire for years, till he had come to think of it as a living being.  The fire was older than he was; it had never gone out since before he was