There is something a little impersonal, almost abstracted, about the way the trains meet out here on their lonely sidewalk through the meadow, twenty inches apart--morning after morning. It always seems as if this time--this one next time--they would not do it right. One argues it all out unconsciously that of course there is a kind of understanding between them as they come bearing down on each other and it's all been arranged beforehand when they left their stations; and yet somehow as I watch them flying up out of the distance, those two still, swift thoughts, or shots of cities--dark, monstrous (it's as if Springfield and Northampton had caught some people up and were firing them at each other)--I am always wondering if this particular time there will not be a report, after all, a clang on the landscape, on all the hills, and a long story in the _Republican_ the next morning. Then they softly crash together and pass on--two or three quiet whiffs at each other--as if nothing had happened. I always feel afterward as if something splendid, some great human act of faith, had been done in my presence. Those two looming, mighty engines, bearing down on each other, making an aim so, at twenty inches from death, and nothing to depend on but those two gleaming dainty strips or ribbons of iron--a few eighths of an inch on the edge of a wheel--I never can get used to it: the two great glowing creatures, full of thunder and trust, leaping up the telegraph poles through the still valley, each of them with its little streak of souls behind it; immortal souls, children, fathers, mothers, smiling, chattering along through Infinity--it all keeps on being boundless to me, and full of a glad boyish terror and faith. And under and through it all there is a kind of stern singing. I know well enough, of course, that it is a platitude, this meeting of two trains in a meadow, but it never acts like one. I sometimes stand and watch the engineer afterward. I wonder if he knows he enjoys it. Perhaps he would have to stop to know how happy he was, and not meet trains for a while. Then he would miss something, I think; he would miss his deep joyous daily acts of faith, his daily habits of believing in things--in steam, and in air, and in himself, and in the switchman, and in God. I see him in his cab window, he swings out his blue sleeve at me! I like the way he stakes everything on what he believes. Nothing between him and death but a few telegraph ticks--the flange of a wheel.... Suddenly the swing of his train comes up like the swing and the rhythm of a great creed. It sounds like a chant down between the mountains. I come into the house lifted with it. I have heard a man believing, believing mile after mile down the valley. I have heard a man believing in a Pennsylvania rolling mill, in a white vapour, in compressed air and a whistle, the way Calvin believed in God. BOOK THREE LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL TO WILBUR WRIGHT AND WILLIAM MARCONI