A Tramp's Notebook Part 9

This is the country of the Basques, that strange, persistent race of which nothing is known. Their history is more covered by ancient clouds than that of the Celts; their tongue has no cousin in the world, though in structure it is like that of the North-American Indians. I met some of them later, but so far know no more than two words of their language.

The wind was cool at St Jean de Luz, but the sun was bright and the sea thundered on the beach and the battered breakwaters. To the east and south are the Pyrenees--lower summits, it is true, but bold and fine in outline. The dominant peak, being the first of the chain, is Larhune (a Basque word, not French), where English blood was spilt when Clauzel held it for Napoleon against the English. Further to the south, and across the Bida.s.soa, in Spain, rises the sharp ridge of the Jaisquivel, beneath which lies Fuentarabia. Yonder by Irun is the abrupt cliff of Las Tres Coronas, three crowns of rock. Here one is in the south-east of the Bay, where France and Spain run together, and the sea, under the dominion of the prevailing south-westers, is rarely at peace with the land. To the northward, but out of sight, lies windy Biarritz; to the south is blood-stained, battered and renewed San Sebastian, a name that recalls many deeds of heroism and many of shame. The horrors of its siege and taking might make one cold even in sunlight. But between us and its new city lies the Bida.s.soa. Here, at St Jean de Luz, is the Nivelle flowing past Ciboure. The river was once familiar to us in despatches. The whole country even yet smells of ancient war. For here lies the great western road to Spain. And more than once it has been the road to Paris. It is a path of rising and falling empire.

During my few days at St Jean de Luz I had foregathered with some exiled friends, walked to quiet Ascain, and regretted I lacked the time even to attain the summit of so small a mountain as Larhune, and then, desiring for once to set foot in Spain, took train to Hendaye. This is the last town in France. Across the Bida.s.soa rose the quaint roofs and towers of old Fuentarabia, the Fontarabie of the French. I hired an eager Basque to row me across the river, then running seaward at the last of the ebb.

The day was splendid and mild. There was no cloud in the sky, not a wreath of mist upon the mountains. The river was a blue that verged on green; its broad sand glowed golden in the sun; to seaward the amethystine waters of the Atlantic heaved and glittered. On the far cliffs they burst in lifting spray. The hills wore the fine faint blue of atmosphere; the wind was very quiet. This seemed at last like peace.

I let my hands feel the cool waters of the river and soaked my soul in the waters of peace.

And yet my bold Basque chattered as he stood at the bows and poled me with a blunted oar across the river shallows. He told me proudly that he had the three languages, that he was all at home with French and Spanish and Basque. He was intelligent within due limits; he at anyrate knew how to extract francs from an Englishman. That generosity which consists in buying interested civility as well as help or transport with an extra fifty centimes is indeed but a wise and calculated waste. It occurred to me that he might solve a question that puzzled me. Were the Basques united as a race, or were their sympathies French or Spanish? After considering how I should put it, I said,--

"Mon ami, est-ce que vous etes plus Basque que Francais, ou plus Francais que Basque?"

He taught me a lesson in simple psychology, for he stopped poling and stared at me for a long minute. Then he scratched his head and a light came into his eyes.

"Mais, monsieur, je suis un Basque Francais!"

My fine distinction was beyond him, and it took me not a little indirect questioning to discover that he was certainly more French than Basque. He presently denounced the Spanish Basques in good round terms, and incidentally showed me that there must be a very considerable difference in their respective dialects. For he complained that the Spanish Basques spoke so fast that it was hard to understand them.

He put me ash.o.r.e at last on a mud flat and accompanied me to the Fonda Miramar, where a bright and pretty waitress hurried, after the fas.h.i.+on of Spaniards, to such an extent that she got me a simple lunch in no more than half an hour. My Spanish is far worse even than my French, but in spite of that we carried on an animated conversation in French and English, Basque and Spanish. At lunch my talk grew more fluent and Mariquita went more deeply into matters. She desired to know what I thought of the Basques, of whom she was one, and a sudden flicker of the deceitful imagination set me inventing. I told her that I was a Basque myself, though I was also an Englishman. She exclaimed at this. She had never heard of English Basques. How was it I did not speak it? This was a sore point with me. I a.s.sured her of the shameful fact that the English Basques had lost their own tongue; they were degenerate. I had some thoughts of learning it in order to re-introduce it into England.

As soon as Mariquita had mastered this astounding story she hurried to the kitchen, and as I heard her relating something with great excitement, I have little doubt that a legend of English Basques is now well on its way past historic doubt. Leaving her to consider the news I had brought, I went out with my boatman to view the old town. I found it quaint and individual and lovely.

A man who has seen much of the world must hold some places strangely and essentially beautiful. My own favourite spots are Auckland, N. Z.; the upper end of the Lake of Geneva; Funchal in Madeira; the valley of the Columbia at Golden City and the valley of the Eden seen from Barras in England. To these I can now add Fuentarabia, the Pyrenees and the Bida.s.soa. I stood upon the roof of the old ruined palace of Charles Le Quint, and on every point of the compa.s.s the view had most peculiar and wonderful qualities. Beneath me was the increasing flood of the frontier river: at my very feet lay the narrow and picturesque street canyons of the ancient town; to the south was Irun in the shelter and shadow of the mountains; east-south-east rose the pyramidal summit of Larhune; the west was the sharp ridge of the brown Jaisquivel which hid San Sebastian; to the north was the rolling Bay; and right to the south the triple crown of Las Tres Coronas cut the sky sharply. Right opposite me Hendaye burnt redly in the glow of the southern sun. In no place that I can remember have I seen two countries, three towns, a range of mountains, a big river and the sea at one time. And there was not a spot in view that had not been stained with the blood of Englishmen.

But now there were no echoes of war in Fuentarabia. Peace lay over its dark homes and within its ancient walls.

ON A VOLCANIC PEAK

I had seen Etna, Vesuvius and Stromboli, but had never yet climbed any volcano until I stood upon the summit of the Peak of Teneriffe, Pico de Teyde, home of the G.o.ds and devils as well as of the aboriginal Guanches of the Canary Islands.

The wind was bitterly cold, more bitter, indeed, than I have ever felt, and yet, as I stood and s.h.i.+vered upon the little crater's brink, fumes of sulphurous acid and smoke swept round me and made me choke. The edge of the crater was of white fired rock; inside the cup the hollow was sulphur yellow. Puffs of smoke came from cracks. I dropped out of the wind and warmed myself at the fire. I picked up warm stones and danced them from one hand to another. And overhead a wind of ice howled. For the Peak is twelve thousand feet and more above the sea. An hour before I had been cutting steps in the last slopes of the last ash cone of the volcano which still lives and may burst into activity at any fatal moment.

To stand upon the Peak and look down upon the world and the sea gives one a great notion of the making of things. Once the world was a crucible. The islands are all volcanic, all ash and cinders, lava and pumice. But I perceived that the Peak itself, the final peak, the last five thousand feet of it, was but the last result of a dying fire--a mere gas spurt to what had been. The whole anatomy of the island is laid bare; the history and the growth of the peak are written in letters of lava, in wastes of pumice and fire-scarred walls. The plain of the Canyadas lies beneath me, and is ten miles across. This was the ancient crater; it is as big as the crater of Kilauea, in the Hawaiian Islands.

But Kilauea is yet truly alive, a sea of lava with many cones spouting lava. Such was the crater of Teneriffe before the last peak rose within its basin. Now retama, a hardy bitter shrub, grows in these plains of pumice; the flats of it are pumice and rapilli, white and brown. But the ancient crater walls stand unbroken for miles, though here and there they have been swept away, some say by floods of water belched from the pit.

From the last ash-peak of fire, as I stood on the crater walls in smoke and a cold wind, I saw no sign of Teneriffe's fertility. The works of man upon the lower slopes below the pinyon forests were invisible. The slopes by Orotava lay under cloud, the sea was hidden almost to its horizon by a vast plain of heaving mist. All I could see plainly was the old crater itself, barren, vast, tremendous, with its fire-scarred walls and its fumaroles. To the west some smoked still, smoked furiously. But though I stood upon the highest peak, another one almost as high lay behind me. Chahorra gaped and gasped, as it seemed, like a leaping, suffocating fish in drying mud. Its crater opened like a mouth and around it lesser holes gaped. On the plain of the old crater there rise two separate volcanoes--one, the true peak, rising 5000 feet from the Canyada floor (itself 7000 feet above the sea), and Chahorra, nearly 4000. But so vast is the ancient crater that these two peaks, one yet alive and the other dead, seem but blisters or boils upon its barren plain. To the north, miles from the edge of my peak, I could see the crater cliff rise red. To the west and east the wall has broken down, but the Fortaleza, as the Canary men call it, stands yet, scarred into chimneys, s.h.i.+ning, half gla.s.sy, half like fired clay. And further to the east, beyond the gap called the Portillo, the cliffs rise again as one follows the trail over that high desert to Vilaflor. White pumice lies under these cliffs, looking like a beach. Once perhaps the crater was level with the sea. It may even be that the crater walls were broken down by outer waters, not by any volcanic flood.

None knows at what time the peak of Chahorra and the great peak were truly active. But obviously the final peak itself was the result of a last great eruption. Perhaps the old crater had been quiescent for thousands of years, and then it worked a little and threw up El Teyde.

At some other time Chahorra rose. At another period, in historic times, the volcano above Garachico, even now smoking bravely, sent its lava into Garachico's harbour and destroyed it. But the last peak as it stands is the work of two periods of activity at least. The first great slope ends at another flat called the Rambleta. Here was once an ancient crater. Then the fires quietened, and there was a time of lesser activity. It woke again, and threw up the last weary ash-cone of a thousand feet or near it.

All things die, but who shall say when a volcano has done its worst? A quiet Vesuvius slew its thousands: Etna its tens of thousands. Some day perhaps Teneriffe will wake again, either in earthquakes or lava-flow, and cause a Casamicciola or a Catania. The cones over against Garachico seemed much alive to me, and had I not warmed frozen hands at the very earth fires themselves? I broke out hot sulphur with the pick of my ice-axe. Icod of the Vines, or Orotava itself, port and villa, might some day wake to such a day as that which has smitten St Pierre in fiery Martinique.

Once all the quiet seas were unbroken by their seven islands--Hierro, Palma, Gomera, Teneriffe, Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote lay beneath the waters of the smiling ocean. Even now they smell of fire and the furnace; in the most fruitful vineyards of Grand Canary the soil is half cinders. In all the islands vast cinder heaps rise black and forbidding. Lava streams, in which the poisonous euphorbia alone can grow, thrust themselves like great d.y.k.es among fertile lands. The very sands of the sea are powdered pumice and black volcanic dust. One of the greatest craters of the world holds within itself great parts of wooded Palma. On dead volcanoes are the petty batteries of Spain over against Las Palmas. There is something strange and almost pathetic in the thought of guns raised where Nature once thundered dreadfully in the barren sunlit Isleta.

But of all the islands and of all parts of them, the Peak, s.h.i.+ning over clouds and visible from far seas, is the king and chief. I left its fiery summit with a certain reluctance. It attracted me strangely. It represented, feebly enough, I daresay, the greatest of all elemental forces. Yet its faint fires and its smoke and sulphur fumes had all the power of a mighty symbol. By such means, by such a formula, had the very world itself been made. Though snow lay upon its slopes and ice bound ancient blocks of lava together, it might at any hour awake again and renew the terrors which once must have floated over the seas in a gust of flame.

SHEEP AND SHEEP-HERDING

With the introduction of fences, which are now coming in with tremendous rapidity, sheep-herding as an art is inevitably doomed. When I knew north-west Texas a few years ago there was not a fence between the Rio Grande and the north of the Panhandle, but now barbed or plain wire is the rule, and in the pastures it is, of course, not so necessary to look after the sheep by day and night. In Australia I have not seen those under my charge for a week or more at a time. While there was water in the paddock I never even troubled to hunt them up in the hundred square miles of grey-green plain with its rare clumps of dwarf box. If dingoes were reported to be about I kept my eyes open, of course, but they were very rare in the Lachlan back blocks, and I was never able to earn the five s.h.i.+llings reward for the tail of this yellow marauder. But in Texas there are more wild animals--the coyote, the bear, the "panther" or puma--and it is impossible to leave the sheep entirely to their own devices, even in pastures which prevent them wandering. Nevertheless, looking after them on fenced land is very different from being with them daily and hourly, sleeping with them at night, following and directing them by day, being all the time wary lest some should be divided from the main flock by accident, or lest the whole body should spy another sheep-owner's band and rush tumultuously into it.

But the new and unaccustomed shepherd on the prairie is apt to give himself much unnecessary trouble. It takes some time to learn that a flock of sheep is like a loosely-knit organism which will not separate or divide if it can help it. It might be compared with a low kind of jelly-fish, or even to a sea-anemone, for under favourable conditions of sun and sky it spreads out to feed, leaving between each of its members what is practically a constant distance. For when the weather changes they come closer together, and any alarm puts them into a compact ma.s.s.

I have heard a gun fired unexpectedly, and then seen some 2000 sheep, spreading loosely over an irregular circle, about half a mile in diameter, rush for a common centre with an infallible instinct. And then they gradually spread out again like that same sea-anemone putting forth its filaments after being touched.

The new shepherd, however, is in constant dread lest they should separate and divide so greatly that he will lose control of them. I have walked many useless miles endeavouring to keep a flock within unnatural limits before I discovered that they never went more than a certain distance from the centre. And this distance varied strictly with the numbers. At night time they begin to draw together, and if they are not put in a corral or fold will at last lie down in a fairly compact ma.s.s, remaining quiet, if undisturbed, until the approach of dawn. But if they have had a bad day for feeding they sometimes get up when the moon rises and begin to graze. Then the shepherd may wake up, and, finding he is alone, have to hunt for them. As they usually feed with their heads up wind it is not as a rule hard to discover them. If the moon is covered by a cloudy sky they will often camp down again.

The hardest days for the shepherd are cold ones, when it blows strongly.

For then the sheep travel at a great pace, and will not go quietly until the sun comes out of the grey sky of the chilly norther, which perhaps moderates towards noon. But in such weather they do not care to camp at noonday, and instead of spreading they will travel onward and onward. They doubtless feel uncomfortable and restless. After such a day they are uneasy at night, especially when there is a moon.

It is my opinion, after experience of both conditions, that unherded sheep do much better than those which are closely looked after. In Australia our percentage of lambs was sometimes 104, and any squatter would think something wrong if his sheep on the plain yielded less than 90 per cent. increase. But in Texas, where the mothers are watched and helped, the increase is seldom indeed 75 in the 100, much oftener it is 60. I used to wonder whether the losses by wild animals would have equalled the loss of 25 per cent. increase which is, I believe, entirely due to the care taken of them. For herding is essentially a worrying process, even when practised by a man who understands sheep well. The mothers are never left alone, and must be driven to a corral at night.

Consequently they often get separated from their lambs before they come to know them, and one of the most pitiful things seen by a shepherd is the poor distracted ewe refusing to recognise her own offspring even when it is shown to her. We used in such cases to put them together in a little pen during the night, hoping that she would "own" it by the morning. But very often she would not, and then the lamb usually died.

If, indeed, it was one of a more st.u.r.dy const.i.tution than most, it would refuse to die and became a kind of Ishmael in the flock. The milk which was necessary it took, or tried to take, from the ewe, who, for just a moment, might not know a stranger was trying to share the right of her own lamb. Such an orphan rarely grows up, and most of them die quickly, as they are knocked about and cruelly used by those who take no interest in the disinherited outcast of that selfish ovine society. And yet its real mother is in the flock, reconciled to her loss after a few days of suffering.

In spite of my present very decided disinclination to have anything to do with sheep, they are, like every other animal, very interesting when closely studied. I spent some years in their society in New South Wales and know a little about them. Shortly before I left Ennis Creek ranch in North-west Texas a very curious incident occurred, which I could never quite satisfactorily explain, for I believe the most serious fright I have ever had in all my life was caused by these same inoffensive, innocent quadrupeds. It was not inflicted on me by a ram, which is occasionally bellicose, but by ewes with their lambs, and I distinctly remember being as surprised as if the sky had fallen or something utterly opposed to all causation had confronted me. I want to meet a man, even of approved courage, who would not be shocked into fair fright by having half-a-dozen ewes suddenly turn and charge him with the fury of a bullock's mad onset. Would he not gasp, be stricken dumb, and look wide-eyed at the customary nature about him, just as if they had broken into awful speech? I imagine he would, for I know that it shook my nerves for an hour afterwards, even though I had by that time recovered sufficient courage to experiment on them in order to see if the same result would again follow. I had about 500 ewes and lambs under my care.

The day was warm, though the wind was blowing strongly, and when noon approached the flock travelled but slowly towards the place where I wished them to make their mid-day camp. To urge them on I took a large bandana handkerchief and flicked the nearest to me with it as I walked behind. As I did so the wind blew it strongly, and it suddenly occurred to me to make a sort of a flag of it in order to see if it would frighten them. I took hold of two corners and held it over my head, so that it might blow out to its full extent. Now, whether it was due to the glaring colour, or the strange att.i.tude, or to the snapping of the outer edge of the handkerchief in the wind--and I think it was the last--I cannot say, but the hindmost ewes suddenly stopped, turned round, eyed me wildly, and then half-a-dozen made a desperate charge, struck me on the legs, threw me over, and fled precipitately as I fell.

It was a reversal of experience too unexpected! I lay awhile and looked at things, expecting to see the sun blue at the least, and then I gathered myself together slowly. In all seriousness I was never so taken aback in all my life, and I was almost prepared for a ewe's biting me. I remembered the Australian story of the rich squatter catching a man killing one of his sheep. "What are you doing that for?" he inquired as a preliminary to requesting his company home until the police could be sent for. The questioned one looked up and answered coolly, though not, I imagine, without a twinkle in his eye, "Kill it! Why am I killing it?

Look here, my friend, I'll kill any man's sheep as bites _me_." For my part, I don't think biting would have alarmed me more. After that I made experiments on the ewes, and always found that the flying bandana simply frightened them into utter desperation when nothing else would. It was a long time before they got used to it. I should like to know if any other sheep-herders ever had the same experience at home or abroad.

In another book I spoke of lambs when they were very young taking my horse for their mother. This was in California; but in Texas I have often seen them run after a bullock or steer. One day on the prairie a lamb had been born during camping-time, and when it was about two hours old a small band of cattle came down to drink at the spring. Among these was a very big steer, with horns nearly a yard long, who came close to the mother, just then engaged in cleaning her offspring. She ran off, bleating for her lamb to follow. The little chap, however, came to the conclusion that the steer was calling it, and went tottering up to the huge animal, that towered above him like the side of a canyon, apparently much to the latter's embarra.s.sment. The steer eyed it carefully, and lifted his legs out of the way as the lamb ran against them, even backing a little, as if as surprised as I had been when the ewes a.s.saulted me. Then all of a sudden he shook his head as if laughing, put one horn under the lamb, threw it about six feet over his back, and calmly walked on. I took it for granted that the unwary lamb was dead, but on going up I found it only stunned, and, being as yet all gristle, it soon recovered sufficiently to acknowledge its real mother, who had witnessed its sudden elevation, stamping with fear and anxiety.

Sheep-herding is supposed, by those who have never followed it, to be an easy, idle, lazy way of procuring a livelihood; but no man who knows as much of their ways as I do will think that. It is true that there are times when there is little or nothing to be done--when a man can sit under a tree quietly and think of all the world save his own particular charge; but for the most part, if he have a conscience, he will feel a burden of responsibility upon him which of itself, independently of the work he may have to do, will earn him his little monthly wage of twenty dollars and the rough ranch food of "hog and hominy." For there is no ceasing of labour for the Texas herder of the plains; Sunday and week-day alike the dawning sun should see him with his flock, and even at night he is still with them as they are "bedded out" in the open.

Even if he can "corral" them in a rough sort of yard, some slinking coyote may come by and scare them into breaking bounds; and when they are not corralled the bright moon may entice them to feed quietly against the wind, until at last the herder wakes to find his charge has vanished and must be anxiously sought for. In Australia, as I have said, the sheep are left to their own devices for the greater part of the year, unless there should be unusual scarcity of water; but even there, to have charge of so many thousand animals, and so many miles of fencing, makes it no enviable task, while the labour, when it does come, is hard and unremitting. In New South Wales I have often been eighteen and twenty hours in the saddle, and have reached home at last so wearied out that I could scarcely dismount. One day I used up three horses and covered over ninety miles, more than fifty of it at a hard canter or gallop--and if that be not work I should like to know what is. This, too, goes on day after day during shearing, just when the days are growing hot and hotter still, the spare herbage browning, and the water becoming scanty and scantier. And for a recompense? There is none in working with sheep. They are quiet, peaceable, stupid, illogical, incapable of exciting affection, very capable of rousing wrath; far different from the terrible excitement of a bellowing herd of long-horned cattle as they break away in a stampede, among whom is danger and sudden death and the glory of motion and conquest; or with horses thundering over the plain in hundreds, like a riderless squadron shaking the ground with waving manes, long flowing tails, and flas.h.i.+ng eyeb.a.l.l.s, whom one can love and delight in, and shout to with a strange, vivid joy that sends the blood tingling to the heart and brain. Were I to go back to such a life I would choose the danger, and be discontented to maunder on behind the slow and harmless wool-bearers, cursing a little every now and again at their foolishness, and then plodding on once more, bunched up in an inert ma.s.s on a slow-going horse, who wearily stretches his neck almost to the ground as he dreams, perhaps, of the long, exhilarating gallops after his own kind that we once had together, being conscious, I daresay, of the contemptuous pity I feel for the slow foredoomed muttons that crawl before us on the long and weary plain.

It is highly probable that the introduction of fences will have its effect in other ways than in increasing the number of lambs born and reared. Sheep-herding will almost disappear when the wild beasts of Texas are extinct, as they soon will be, for a fenced country is very unfit for such animals. But then the natural glory of the wide open prairie will be gone, and civilisation will gradually destroy all that was so delightful, even when my sheep, by worrying me, taught me what I have here set down.

RAILROAD WARS

Everybody nowadays has some notion of the way the railroad business of America is carried on. They know that there are too many roads for the traffic, and that, to prevent a general ruin, the managers combine, pay the profits into the hands of a receiver, and receive again from him a certain agreed proportion of the whole sum. But this method of "pooling"

the profits is sometimes unsatisfactory. One line will think it gets too little if the fluctuations of trade send more freight over its rails than it formerly had, and will demand a greater proportion of the gross profits. This demand may be granted, but if not, the agreement may break down, and the discontented railroad go to work on the old principle of every man for himself. This very likely inaugurates a war of tariffs; fares and freights go down slowly or quickly according as the quarrel is open or secret, until one or other of the parties gives in to avoid complete ruin.

While I was living in San Francisco, early in 1886, there was an open war between all the lines west of Chicago and Kansas City, including the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, the Denver and Rio Grande, the Southern Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Fares to New York and the Atlantic seaboard came tumbling down by $10 at a fall. The usual rate from New York to San Francisco is $72. It fell to 60, to 50, 40, 30, to 25, to 22. All the railroad offices had great placards outside inviting everyone to go East at once, for they would never get such a chance again. Some of the notices were very odd. One began with "Blood, blood, blood!" and another had a hand holding a bowie knife, with the legend "Here we cut deep!" And, as I have said, they did cut deep, for at the end one might go to New York for about $18. Now this $18 went in a lump to the railroad east of Chicago. Consequently the pa.s.sengers were carried over 2000 miles for nothing. Frequently during two days men were booked to Chicago or Kansas City from San Francisco or Los Angeles for $1. Two thousand miles for 4s. 2d!

Such a state of things could not last, but while it did it gave rise to much speculation. Many men bought up tickets, good for some time, believing the bottom prices had been reached when the fall had by no means ended. It was odd to stand outside an office and listen to the crowd. Some would hold on and say, "I'll chance it till to-morrow." Then I have seen an agent come outside and say, "Gentlemen, now's your time to go east and visit your families. Don't delay. Of course fares may fall further, but I think not. Don't be too greedy. You are not likely to get the chance again of going home for twenty-five dollars." They did fall further, but recovered again on the rumour of negotiations beginning between the competing lines. When that was contradicted they fell again. Suddenly, without any warning, they jumped up to normal rates, and left many of the outside public--the bears, so to speak--lamenting that they had not taken the opportunity so eloquently pointed out by the oratorical agents on the sidewalk by the offices. For the placards and pictures came down at once, and to an inquirer who asked, "What can you do New York at?" the answer was, "Why, sir, the usual rate--$72."

To an Englishman who has not travelled in the States and become familiar with the methods employed there by business men, it seems odd that anyone should chaffer with the clerk at a ticket-office. What would an English booking-clerk say if he were asked about the fare to some place, and, on replying 1, received the rejoinder, "I'll give you 15s?" He would think the man a joker of a very feeble description. Yet this may often be done in Western America. Even when there is no "war" the agents have a certain margin to veer and haul on in their commission, and will often knock off a little sooner than allow a rival line to get the pa.s.senger. Besides, it frequently happens that there may be a secret cutting of rates without an open war. My own experience, when I came down from Sonoma County in the autumn of 1886, meaning to return to England, will give a very good notion of this, and of the way to get a cheap ticket when there is the trouble among the companies which may end in a war, or be patched up by arbitration.

It had been said in the papers for some time that rate-cutting was going on in San Francisco, and this made me hurry down not to lose the opportunity. The morning after my arrival I walked into an office in Kearney Street and said briefly, "What are you doing to New York?" The clerk said in a business way, "Seventy-two dollars." I laughed a little and looked at him straight without speaking. "Hum," said he; "well, you can go for sixty-five." "Thanks," I said, "it isn't enough." I walked out, and though he called me back I would not return. Then I went to Mr P., a well-known agent for railroads and steams.h.i.+ps. To use a vulgarism, he did not open his mouth so wide as the other, but at once offered me a through ticket to Liverpool for $72. I thanked him and said I would call again. Deducting the $12 for a steerage pa.s.sage, his railroad fare was $60. So far I had knocked off 12. And now it began to rain very hard. It did not cease all day. And my day's work was only begun, for it was only ten o'clock then. I went from one office to another, quoting one's rates here and another's there, and slowly I dropped the fare to fifty. I had to explain to some of these men that I was not a fool, and that I knew what I was doing; that if they took me for a "tenderfoot," or a "sucker," they were mistaken. My explanations always had an effect, and down the fare tumbled. At last, about three o'clock, I had got things to a very fine point, and was working two rival offices which stood side by side near the Palace Hotel. One man--Mr A., whom I knew by name, who indeed knew a friend of mine--offered me $45. I shook my head, and going next door, Mr V. made it a dollar less. It took me half-an-hour to reduce that again to forty-three; but at last Mr A., who was as much interested in this little game as if I were a big stake at poker, went suddenly down to $41. I offered to toss him whether it should be $40 or $42. He accepted, and I won the toss. As he made out the ticket, he remarked, almost sadly, "We don't make anything out of this." But he cheered up, and added, "Well, the others don't either." So I got my ticket; and it was over one of the best lines. By that day's work, though I got wet through, covered with mud, and very tired, I saved $32.