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Is there not an element of the picturesque in the struggles of the Western farmer? Can anything be finer in its way than a night view of Pittsburg that "Hell with its lid off," where the cold gleam of electricity vies with the lurid glare of the furnaces and smelting works?
The sun rose, a great, pale-red ball, hot at sunrise, and it soared blazing-white at noon, to burn slowly westward through a cloudless, coppery sky, at last to set sullen and crimson over the ranges. Spokane, being the only center of iron, steel, brick, and masonry in this area, resembled a city of furnaces. Business was slack.
Under the observatory, in the south tower, was the museum and library, and below this again was the laboratory in a subterraneous crypt, containing sixteen furnaces of various kinds. Beneath this was a well forty feet deep, from which water was distributed by syphons to every part of the building.
All ends in the same: iron mines, coal mines, factories, furnaces, the counter, the desk no one can live on iron, or coal, or cotton the object is really sacks of wheat. Therefore to the eye of the mind they are not sacks of wheat, but filled to the brim, like those in the magic caves of the 'Arabian Nights, with gold.
The little room was soon filled to overflowing with lawyers, scholars, and, above all, physicians, the celebrated monsieur Ambroise Paré, doctor to the queen-mother, and a Huguenot like himself, at their head. During nine years Palissy continued to deliver these lectures every Lent, working steadily most of the day among his furnaces at the Tuileries.
And he had a little small bull-pup, that to look at him you'd think he warn't worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a chance to steal something. But as soon as money was up on him he was a different dog; his under-jaw'd begin to stick out like the fo'-castle of a steamboat, and his teeth would uncover and shine like the furnaces.
A. The sides of the internal furnaces or flues in all boilers should be so constructed that the steam may readily escape from their surfaces, with which view it is expedient to make the bottom of the flue somewhat wider than the top, or slightly conical in the cross section; and the upper plates should always be overlapped by the plates beneath, so that the steam cannot be retained in the overlap, but will escape as soon as it is generated.
In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.
The scientific authorities were all against it. Curiously enough, the weight of scientific authority is always against anything new. Marine architects and mathematicians proved to their own satisfaction at least that no vessel could carry enough coal to cross the Atlantic, that the coal bunkers would have to be bigger than the vessel itself, in order to hold a sufficient supply for the furnaces.
AT THIS SHOUT the entire crew rushed toward the harpooner commander, officers, mates, sailors, cabin boys, down to engineers leaving their machinery and stokers neglecting their furnaces. The order was given to stop, and the frigate merely coasted. By then the darkness was profound, and as good as the Canadian's eyes were, I still wondered how he could see and what he had seen.
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