United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The problem then was to deliver at Chattanooga and beyond one hundred and thirty car-loads daily, leaving the beef-cattle to be driven on the hoof, and all the troops in excess of the usual train-guards to march by the ordinary roads. Colonel Anderson promptly explained that he did not possess cars or locomotives enough to do this work.
What a pretty little member, intelligent and adroit, which executes whatever one wills books, laces, houses, pyramids, locomotives, pastry, or caresses, which last is its pleasantest function." He drew off the rings one by one, and as the wedding-ring fell in its turn, he murmured smilingly: "The law! Let us salute it!" "Nonsense!" said the Countess, slightly wounded.
He wavered, stopped, then tried to back. But Jawn let out another notch, and rammed his bull nose into and through the other's pilot with such force that both locomotives left the track. The collision occurred at the southern end of the cut. It had for the men in the C. & S.C. train the additional force of unexpectedness.
In a short time the rolling stock of the road was taxed to its utmost capacity, and the newly appointed purchasing agent was buying cars and locomotives right and left. Also, to keep pace with the ever-increasing procession of trains, a doubled construction force wrought night and day installing new side tracks and passing points.
It deprives us of our ability to calculate as to time; but do the best you can. Hurlbut can do nothing till A. J. Smith returns from Red River. I will then order him to occupy Grenada temporarily, and to try and get those locomotives that we need here.
Then Harry and I walked down to the freight-siding, where the big box cars hauled out ready from under the elevators were waiting. Two huge locomotives were presently coupled on, there followed a clanging of bells, and we watched the twinkling tail-lights grow dimmer across the prairie.
At night, alone, she had comfort in the multitudinous cries from the railroads that ribbed the prairie in this outskirt of the city. The shrieks of the locomotives were like the calls of great savage birds, raising their voices melodiously as they fled to and fro into the roaring cavern of the city, outward to the silent country, to the happier, freer regions of man.
Local trains, drawn by wheezy, tin-pot locomotives of outworn pattern, arrived and departed with such casualness as to render schedules a joke, and not infrequently "bogged down" between stations until some antediluvian engine could be resuscitated and sent out to the rescue. The day coaches were of the old, dangerous, wooden type.
Optimism was as natural as breathing. It was manifest destiny that cities and corporations and locomotives and armies and navies and national debts and daily newspapers, with their Sunday supplements, and bank clearances and tariffs and insurance companies and the price of living should go up. It was all according to a beautiful natural law, "as fire ascending seeks the sun."
That is, they give false views of life, making it consist, if it be worth living, of a series of adventures, hair-breadth escapes; encounters with tyrannical schoolmasters and unnatural parents; sea voyages in which the green hand commands a ship and defeats a mutiny out of sheer smartness; rides on runaway locomotives, strokes of good luck, and a persistent turning up of things just when they are wanted all of which is calculated in the long run to lead away the young imagination and impart discontent with the common lot of an uneventful life.
Word Of The Day