United States or Ireland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Before the stage sets you down at Mendocino, or "Big River," you will have noticed that the coast-line is broken at frequent intervals by the mouths of small streams, and at the available points at the mouths of these streams saw-mills are placed.
Great experience is required to accustom the ear to the correct intonation, as in general the tensile strain on the saws approximates so closely to the breaking point that one or two extra taps on the keys are quite sufficient to rupture them. Mr. Brunel, in the government saw-mills at Woolwich, adopted a method of hanging saws by means of a weighted lever, like a Roman steelyard.
Going home, I knocked at the cabin where Jack and Dilsy lay snoring side by side with the velocity of rival saw-mills, and begged Dilsy to give me a bite about daybreak coffee and corn-batter cakes saying that I could get breakfast when I returned. I shared this scant bite with my young soldier to Dilsy's abject mortification, I not having told her of his coming.
"My poor lad," he would murmur to himself, as he caught sight of Bonnyboy's big perspiring face, with the yellow tuft of hair hanging down over his forehead, "clever you are not; but you have that which the cleverest of us often lack." There were sixteen saw-mills in all, and the one at which Bonnyboy was employed was the last of the series.
Some saw-mills in the neighbourhood were burnt down, so the following Sunday we had a sermon on hell-fire. The kirk was very large and quaint; a stair led to a gallery on each side of the pulpit, which was intended for the tradespeople, and each division was marked with a suitable device, and text from Scripture.
And it so happened, probably because saw-mills and house-space were scarce, that the saloons accommodated the gambling tables and the polished dance-house floors. And here, because he needs must bend to custom, Corliss's adaptation went on rapidly. And as Carthey, who appreciated him, soliloquized, "The best of it is he likes it damn well, by damn!"
In his occasional letters to me while we all were in England Roscoe seldom spoke of her, but, when he did, showed that he knew of her movements. This did not strike me at the time as anything more than natural. It did later. Within a couple of weeks I reached Viking, a lumbering town with great saw-mills, by way of San Francisco and Vancouver.
Let's go back to the banks of our beloved river, you and I and get up early in the morning and run to the riffles near the old cooper-shop and catch a bucket of shiners and chubs, and then hurry on to Boomer's dam or 'way upstream above the Island where we used to have the Sunday-school picnics or, maybe just stay at the in-town dam near the flour mills and the saw-mills where old Shoemaker Schmidt used to catch so many big ones fat, yellow pike and broad black-bass.
Stephen O'Mara found Hardwick Elliott lunching alone in the East Coast Company's main Morrison office, a big unpainted shack that stood half lost in a maze of high-piled ties, midway between the saw-mills at the river edge and the first snarled network of switches converging on one reddish streak of steel that lanced into the north.
The greater proportion of the saw-logs are, however, cut up for exportation to the United States by the various saw-mills on the river, or by a large steam saw-mill with twenty or thirty run of saws, erected on a little island in the mouth of the river.
Word Of The Day