DISTANCE, and especially if it has MOTION for a handmaid. Its enchantments are not merely those of a Costumer, draping mountains in azure, and "such like."

A wave of its wand, and presto, magical changes are wrought, that would have kept that incorrigible Sultan-if he was a Sultan-a "thousand and one nights" longer, with the hearing.

Did you ever creep gingerly-should there be another "ly" to the gingerly?—up to the deck of a Railway Car, when the train was moving, say twenty-five or thirty miles an hour? And did you look away on, beyond the Train, where the two iron bars— that noblest couplet in the great epic of the time— were welded lovingly together, without hammer, or furnace, or fire, but just beneath the wonderful, invisible fingers of Distance, till they lay there, a huge V upon the bosom of the Prairie? And how marvellously, as the Train moved on, those stubborn bars swayed round to a parallel; as lightly and noiselessly as a brace of sunbeams, flung from a mirror swinging in the wanton wind, sweep round in the blue air? And did you "mind "—not a spike wrenched from its good hold, not a tie un-tied, not a timber splintered? There must be a charm in those fingers indeed.

There now, a brood of little haycocks, escaped from their native meadow, have clustered down on the track, right before the Engine. Heedless little things! But age will bring wisdom, and one of these days, they'll be discreet haystacks, and not go gossiping upon Railroad tracks. Will be! Why, they are getting to be stacks already. From Lilliput to the other place what a name it is to write!—is but a minute, or a minute and a half. How they expand and "get up in the world" as we near them. And they hear the Train, for see, they are wheeling in a sort of Knickerbocker waltz to the right and left, over the fence and back of the barn and beyond the orchard, and there they are, dignified and imperturbable as Haystacks ought to be.

And those little Bushes-a capital B, if they are bushes exactly in the way, whispering and all of a flutter, dodging up here, and nestling down there, like truants in the "Entry," during school hours. On thunders the Train, and up jump the Bushes.

Bushes indeed; TREES, forest trees, trees of a century; columns in "God's first temples." The trees are on the track; growing on the track! On the track indeed. By the holy rood, they are rods

away, just where they were before Railways were

dreamed of.

And the worker of all this diablerie!

You can

see the fluttering of her blue robe just there in the horizon. She has gone on to conjure again. It is DISTANCE !

The Church moves

"Stop the Train! Let us off! Conductor, Captain, Some body, Any body!" There's a village on the Track; born, christened, and grown since last night. There's a Meeting House and a Grave Yard and a Block of Stores in the way! On we plunge-dispelled at the first whistle! gravely away, as churches should. The Grave Yard, with its sleeping tenantry, is whisked out of sight like a trundle-bed; a martin-box of a cottage scuds round the corner of the Meeting House; the row of brick stores, very much flushed, steps six paces to the rear; the cars jar on, and Distance and Motion are in the secret.

Look behind you, and they are adjusting the machinery for the next Train. Back goes the village that had been frightened away by the whistle, and the stacks and the trees grow beautifully less," and so it is every day, and all day and every where, when Distance and Motion are partners. There's a some

thing on the track again! It's a fly—it's a frog—it's a child-it's a man-six feet high—a P. M.—an M. C. On we go. We have passed him. We have left him. Five feet high-four feet high-a child—a frog-a bug-a nothing! What pranks Distance can play with man and his dignities, as the cars drive rattling on. Your D. D. is dwindled down; your P. M. is past minding; your M. C. is microscopic curiosity.

Sometimes, a little village parts the foliage of an "Oak Opening," and peeps out to see the train go by. Here another skulks like a quail; you catch a glimpse of it as you thunder past, and one cannot help thinking it will venture forth again when he is fairly out of sight. A third, a bold vixen, stands beside the track waiting for the cars. You whirl by a fourth-houses set down any where and very uneasy, as if just camped for the night, and glad to move "westward ho!" in the morning.

And so they work wonders-the wonderful Twoall along the way, slipping hamlets, towns, marts, on the iron string, as if they were so many beads, in a necklace for a Camanche's wearing. Why, one meets six-rail fences every day, "staked and ridered" at that, plunging along like quarter horses. Strips

of narrow yellow ribbon widen into broad acres of golden grain; scattered skeins of silk Floss are webbed into running rivers; paltry patches of green, are whole" sections of red clover; little out-door Ovens, arched Depots of two hundred feet; the Railway itself, in the magic of Distance, seems the double scoring of the beautiful fields and lakes and towns along which those lines are drawn, that the Compositor may 'set them up' in CAPITALS, every one; and the Engine, a glossy black beetle creeping over the disc of the Prairies; "the transit" of iron, that Astronomers never foretold.

Lo! there, "the breathing thought,"

The poets sang of old,

And there "the burning word,"

No tongue had fully told,
Until the magic hand,

The bold conception wrought,

In iron and in fire it stands

The world's embodied THOUGHT.

Lo! in the panting thunders,

Hear the echo of the Age!
Lo! in the globe's broad breast, behold
The poet's noblest page!

For in the brace of iron bars,

That weld two worlds in one,

The couplet of a nobler lay

Than bards have e'er begun!