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Show AS VIEWED BY AN ENGINEER. Impressions of a Piano Solo From a Railroad Rail-road Man's Standpoint. "I was loitering around the streets one night, "said Jim Nelson, one of the old locomotive engineers running into New Orleans, to a reporter. "As I had nothing to do I dropped into a concert and heard a sleek looking Frenchman play a piano in a way that made me feel all over in spots. As soon as he sat down on the stool I knew by the way he handled himself that he understood the machine he was running. He tapped the keys way up one end, just as if they were gauges, and be wanted to see if he had water enough. Then he looked np as if he wanted to know how much steam he was carrying, and the next moment he pulled open the throttle and sailed on to the main line as if he was half an hour late. You could hear her thunder over culverts and bridges and getting faster and faster until the fellow fel-low rocked about in bis seat like a cradle. cra-dle. Somehow thought it was old '38' pulling a passenger train and getting out of the way of a 'special.' The fellow fel-low worked the keys on the middle division di-vision like lightning, and then he flew along the north end of the line until the drivers went around like a buzzsaw, and I got excited. "About the time I was fixing to tell him to cut her off a little he kicked the dampers under the machine wide open, palled the throttle way back in the tender, tend-er, and how he did run I I couldn't stand it any longer and yelled to him that he was pounding on the left side, and if he wasn't careful he'd drop hi3 ash pan. But he didn't hear. No one heard me. Everything was flying and whizzing. Telegraph poles on the sido of the track looked like a row cf corq-r stalks, the trees appeared to be a mud bank, and all the time the exhaust of i the old machine sounded like the hum of a bumblebee. "I tried to yell out, but my tongue wouldn't move. He went around curves like a bullet, slipped an eccentric, blew out his 6oft plug, went down grades 50 feet to the mile and not a controlling break set. She went by the meeting point at a mile a minute and calling for more steam. My hair stood up straight, because I knew the game wa9 up. Sure enough, dead ahead of U3 was the headlight of a 'special.' In a daze I heard the crash ai they -struck, and I saw cars shivered into atoms, people smashed and mangled and bleeding and gasping for water. I heard another crash as the French professor struck the deep keys away down on the lower end of the southern division, and then I came to my senses. There he was at a dead standstill, with the door of the firebox fire-box of the machine open, wiping the perspiration off his face and bowing to the people before him. If I live to be 1,000 years .old, I'll never forget the ride that Frenchman gave me on a piano." pi-ano." New Orleans Times-Democrat. |