With the meagre data available, it is difficult to determine whether the name Hosselkus belongs to the Anglo-Saxon, Indo-European, or Teutonic family; but no such uncertainty attached to the origin of its unfortunate bearer. He was an unmistakable Yankee; rather below the medium height, lean and wiry; his mild, light-blue eyes were overshadowed by bushy and frowning eyebrows, and his grizzled mustache bristled with a singular ferocity, which the weakness of mouth and chin immediately belied. The whole man was decidedly contradictory. When first addressed, his manner was brusque and his voice gruff; but, after a few terrible expletives, his tone would soften and his most positive assertions invariably ended with an appeal for confirmation. “Now ain’t it so, for a fact? Now wouldn’t you say so, ’f you’uz me?” he would ask, while his wistful eyes wandered from face to face in search of support or sympathy, perhaps. He was the oldest engineer on the division, and the most unfortunate. Two decades of brakemen and conductors had twisted and distorted his luckless surname in every conceivable way; but to all appellations, from “Old Hoss” to “Hustle-Cuss,” he ever accorded the same ready response. Of late years he had been known simply as “Hard Luck.” When a train-crew would reach the end of the division, wan and famished from a protracted sojourn at some desert-siding, the first inquiry of their sympathetic brethren would be: “Who was pullin’ you?” “Old Hard Luck, of course,” was the seldom varied reply. Old Hosselkus had probably suffered more “moving accidents by flood and field” than any other man ever lived through. And yet he was a thoroughly competent engineer. He was an earnest student of mechanical engineering, and could explain the mysteries of “link motion,” the principles of the “injector,” and the working of the Westinghouse automatic air-brake in a singularly lucid manner. Nothing pleased him better than to enlighten a green fireman upon some knotty point, and the walls of the roundhouse and bunkhouse are still covered with his elaborate chalk and pencil diagrams of the different parts of the locomotive.