The plan worked very well, the competition
for the places was hot. The conductor of the 4.33 express was
a duke; there wasn't a passenger conductor on the line below
the degree of earl. They were good men, every one, but they had
two defects which I couldn't cure, and so had to wink at: they
wouldn't lay aside their armor, and they would "knock down" fare
--I mean rob the company.
There was hardly a knight in all the land who wasn't in some useful
employment. They were going from end to end of the country in all
manner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering,
and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effective
spreaders of civilization we had. They went clothed in steel and
equipped with sword and lance and battle-axe, and if they couldn't
persuade a person to try a sewing-machine on the installment plan,
or a melodeon, or a barbed-wire fence, or a prohibition journal,
or any of the other thousand and one things they canvassed for,
they removed him and passed on.
I was very happy. Things were working steadily toward a secretly
longed-for point.
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