" Not just now and again, as other boys do, but he rarely
touched a game or a sport before he would ingeniously twist it into a
"pretend" railroad. Marbles were to him merely things to be used to
indicate telegraph poles, with glass and agate alleys as stations.
Sliding down hill on a bobsleigh, he invariably tooted and whistled like
an engine, and trudging uphill he puffed and imitated a heavy freight
climbing up grade. The ball grounds were to him the "Y" at the Junction,
the shunting yards, or the turn bridge at the roundhouse, for Benny's
father was an engineer, who ran the fast mail over the big western
division of the new road, where mountains and forests were cut and
levelled and tunnelled for the long, heavy transcontinental train to
climb through, and in his own home the boy heard little but railroad
talk, so he came by his preferences honestly.
"Well, Benny, been railroading to-day?" his father would often ask
playfully, on one of the three nights in the week when he was home,
with the grime of the engine coal-oiled from his big hands, and his
blue over-jeans hanging out behind the kitchen door.
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