The $30,000 Bequest, and Other Stories

  THE DANGER OF LYING IN BED

  The man in the ticket-office said:

  "Have an accident insurance ticket, also?"

  "No," I said, after studying the matter over a little. "No, I believenot; I am going to be traveling by rail all day today. However, tomorrowI don't travel. Give me one for tomorrow."

  The man looked puzzled. He said:

  "But it is for accident insurance, and if you are going to travel byrail--"

  "If I am going to travel by rail I sha'n't need it. Lying at home in bedis the thing _I_ am afraid of."

  I had been looking into this matter. Last year I traveled twentythousand miles, almost entirely by rail; the year before, I traveledover twenty-five thousand miles, half by sea and half by rail; and theyear before that I traveled in the neighborhood of ten thousand miles,exclusively by rail. I suppose if I put in all the little odd journeyshere and there, I may say I have traveled sixty thousand miles duringthe three years I have mentioned. _And never an accident._

  For a good while I said to myself every morning: "Now I have escapedthus far, and so the chances are just that much increased that I shallcatch it this time. I will be shrewd, and buy an accident ticket." Andto a dead moral certainty I drew a blank, and went to bed that nightwithout a joint started or a bone splintered. I got tired of that sortof daily bother, and fell to buying accident tickets that were goodfor a month. I said to myself, "A man _can't_ buy thirty blanks in onebundle."

  But I was mistaken. There was never a prize in the the lot. I could readof railway accidents every day--the newspaper atmosphere was foggy withthem; but somehow they never came my way. I found I had spent a gooddeal of money in the accident business, and had nothing to show for it.My suspicions were aroused, and I began to hunt around for somebody thathad won in this lottery. I found plenty of people who had invested,but not an individual that had ever had an accident or made a cent. Istopped buying accident tickets and went to ciphering. The result wasastounding. THE PERIL LAY NOT IN TRAVELING, BUT IN STAYING AT HOME.

  I hunted up statistics, and was amazed to find that after all theglaring newspaper headlines concerning railroad disasters, less than_three hundred_ people had really lost their lives by those disastersin the preceding twelve months. The Erie road was set down as the mostmurderous in the list. It had killed forty-six--or twenty-six, I do notexactly remember which, but I know the number was double that of anyother road. But the fact straightway suggested itself that the Erie wasan immensely long road, and did more business than any other line inthe country; so the double number of killed ceased to be matter forsurprise.

  By further figuring, it appeared that between New York and Rochester theErie ran eight passenger-trains each way every day--16 altogether; andcarried a daily average of 6,000 persons. That is about a million in sixmonths--the population of New York City. Well, the Erie kills from 13 to23 persons of _its_ million in six months; and in the same time 13,000of New York's million die in their beds! My flesh crept, my hair stoodon end. "This is appalling!" I said. "The danger isn't in traveling byrail, but in trusting to those deadly beds. I will never sleep in a bedagain."

  I had figured on considerably less than one-half the length of the Erieroad. It was plain that the entire road must transport at least elevenor twelve thousand people every day. There are many short roads runningout of Boston that do fully half as much; a great many such roads. Thereare many roads scattered about the Union that do a prodigious passengerbusiness. Therefore it was fair to presume that an average of 2,500passengers a day for each road in the country would be almost correct.There are 846 railway lines in our country, and 846 times 2,500 are2,115,000. So the railways of America move more than two millions ofpeople every day; six hundred and fifty millions of people a year,without counting the Sundays. They do that, too--there is no questionabout it; though where they get the raw material is clear beyond thejurisdiction of my arithmetic; for I have hunted the census through andthrough, and I find that there are not that many people in the UnitedStates, by a matter of six hundred and ten millions at the very least.They must use some of the same people over again, likely.

  San Francisco is one-eighth as populous as New York; there are 60 deathsa week in the former and 500 a week in the latter--if they have luck.That is 3,120 deaths a year in San Francisco, and eight times as manyin New York--say about 25,000 or 26,000. The health of the two places isthe same. So we will let it stand as a fair presumption that this willhold good all over the country, and that consequently 25,000 out ofevery million of people we have must die every year. That amounts toone-fortieth of our total population. One million of us, then, dieannually. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot,drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in someother popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirtconflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops,breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patentmedicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a maneach; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to thatappalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!

  You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. Therailroads are good enough for me.

  And my advice to all people is, Don't stay at home any more than you canhelp; but when you have _got _to stay at home a while, buy a package ofthose insurance tickets and sit up nights. You cannot be too cautious.

  (One can see now why I answered that ticket-agent in the manner recordedat the top of this sketch.)

  The moral of this composition is, that thoughtless people grumble morethan is fair about railroad management in the United States. When weconsider that every day and night of the year full fourteen thousandrailway-trains of various kinds, freighted with life and armed withdeath, go thundering over the land, the marvel is, _not _that they killthree hundred human beings in a twelvemonth, but that they do not killthree hundred times three hundred!