The following summer, my wife, Helen Gardner, and I were waiting in the Erie station at Binghamton, New York, for a two a.m. train. It was a dingy station, the waiting room lighted by one flickering oil lamp. All engineers look alike in their working clothes, I have observed. An engineer opened the door, passed mistily through the gloom, removed the lamp from its bracket and lit his pipe at the flame. To my drowsy eyes he was the image of that Mobile and Ohio freight engineer, and the illusion brought back the scene so vividly that I had to put the pipe aside and go out into the air to shake myself together.
Ten or twelve years later, I dined one evening with Richard Mansfield in his private car in the railroad yards at New Orleans. There were no interlocking switches then and a railroad yard swarmed with bobbing lanterns carried by switchmen. I stopped one such, hobbling along on one leg and a wooden stump, and asked if he could direct me to the Mansfield car.
"Yes, Mr. Hopper," he said and showed the way.
"Do I know you?" I asked.
"Well, I had both of these when you saw
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