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He avoided churches, buildings, and mono-rail cables with consummate ease as he conversed. "Me name's Butteridge," he shouted; "B-U-T-T-E-R-I-D-G-E. Got it? Me mother was Scotch."
He found himself drifting down towards a mono-rail line, and hastily flung out two or three handfuls of ballast to clear it. "Lemme see! One might say just 'Pre'nez'! Wish I knew the French for take hold of the rope!... I suppose they are French?" He surveyed the country again. "Might be Holland. Or Luxembourg. Or Lorraine 's far as I know. Wonder what those big affairs over there are?
People began to talk of flying with an air of never having for one moment dropped the subject. Pictures of flying and flying machines returned to the newspapers; articles and allusions increased and multiplied in the serious magazines. People asked in mono-rail trains, "When are we going to fly?" A new crop of inventors sprang up in a night or so like fungi.
Old Smallways went to his grave under an intricate network of wires and cables, for Bun Hill became not only a sort of minor centre of power distribution the Home Counties Power Distribution Company set up transformers and a generating station close beside the old gas-works but, also a junction on the suburban mono-rail system.
In face and expression he was curiously like that old Thomas Smallways who had once been coachman to Sir Peter Bone, and this was just as it should be, for he was Tom Smallways the son, who formerly kept the little green-grocer's shop under the straddle of the mono-rail viaduct in the High Street of Bun Hill.
Great crowds assembled, more especially in the dinner hour, in Madison Square about the Farragut monument, to listen to and cheer patriotic speeches, and a veritable epidemic of little flags and buttons swept through these great torrents of swiftly moving young people, who poured into New York of a morning by car and mono-rail and subway and train, to toil, and ebb home again between the hours of five and seven.
He saw a large house on fire on a hillside to the right, and no man heeding it.... They came to a narrow railroad bridge and presently to a mono-rail train standing in the track on its safety feet. It was a remarkably sumptuous train, the Last Word Trans-Continental Express, and the passengers were all playing cards or sleeping or preparing a picnic meal on a grassy slope near at hand.
It was a vast busy space stretching away northward as far as he could see, methodically cut up into numbered sheds, gasometers, squad encampments, storage areas, interlaced with the omnipresent mono-rail lines, and altogether free from overhead wires or cables. Everywhere was the white, black and yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black eagles spread their wings.
It had a most home-like and comfortable quality, and it was made gayer by abundant flags. Along the road a quantity of peasant folk, in big pair-wheeled carts and afoot, were coming and going, besides an occasional mono-rail car; and at the car-junction, under the trees outside the town, was a busy little fair of booths.
There is the mono-rail system of land traction, electrically propelled, which has yet to be tested in a practical way; while on the sea, perhaps, under pressure of competition, and with an increasing demand for greater speeds, it may be possible to adapt with advantage, even on large craft, some principle of the hydroplane.
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