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They told us that at Hamburg and at Baltimore great cranes were used, one of which could lift a sixty-five ton locomotive, to lift the gun to the trucks that were to carry it on the railroad; they had to put eight trucks under it, fastening two together, then the two pair together, and so on till they had the eight all well fastened to each other, when they laid the gun on them and started it off.

Pelicans and flamingoes, geese and ducks, storks and herons, ibises and cranes, bitterns and lapwings, flew in dark flocks of manifold forms from all directions.

Then slowly the sun rose to glorify the dripping reeds and canes, and fringe them as if with precious stones; the different kinds of ducks and cranes disturbed by our boat fled at our approach with much flapping of wings and many a discordant cry.

The heat was a thing of the past; cool and bracing weather appeared; and with it great flocks of wild fowl, "swans, geese, ducks and cranes." Famine vanished, sickness decreased. The dead were dead. Of the hundred and four persons left by Newport less than fifty had survived. But these may be thought of as indeed seasoned.

Here lazy, big, black water snakes, for which the creek was named, sunned on the bushes, wild ducks and grebe chattered, cranes and herons fished, and muskrats plowed the bank in queer, rolling furrows. It was always a place full of interest, so Freckles loved to linger on the bridge, watching the marsh and water people.

There are likewise many cranes, swannes, geese, mallardes, fesauntes, partridges, thrusshes, black birdes, turtles, finches, redd brestes, nightingales, sparrowes, with other sortes of birdes even as in Fraunce, and greate plentie and store.

The ancients, who had a very faint and imperfect knowledge of the great peninsula of Africa, were sometimes tempted to believe, that the torrid zone must ever remain destitute of inhabitants; and they sometimes amused their fancy by filling the vacant space with headless men, or rather monsters; with horned and cloven-footed satyrs; with fabulous centaurs; and with human pygmies, who waged a bold and doubtful warfare against the cranes.

The din of the day's quarrying was over the blasting and drilling, the creaking of the great cranes, the shouts of the foremen, the backing and shifting of the flat-cars hauling the heavy blocks of limestone. Down in the hotel office three or four of the labourers were growling and swearing over a belated game of checkers.

As I entered this palace, sacred to its song, how its echoes rolled through my ear pans, how them pans seemed to fairly shiver under the mighty strokes of the song, and its weird, painful accompaniment of boilers a-boilin', rollin' mills a-rollin'! Water wheels, freight elevators cranes a-cranin', derricks a-derrickin', divin' apparatus, fire-extinguishin' apparatus

Some had covered their heads with caps made of the skins of water-antelopes, with the horns still attached, part of the skin hanging down over their shoulders so as to conceal the upper part of their bodies. Others had manufactured the heads and beaks and long necks of white cranes into coverings for their heads.