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It is hardly too fanciful on seeing its covering slide away, its switches swinging, its turn-tables revolving, its drawbridges opening to declare that such a road is an animal an animal proving its nature, according to Aristotle, by the power to move itself. Nor is it at all censurable to ask of a road like this where it "goes to."

To facilitate such transit, there was a little iron railway all along the centre of the table, with miniature turn-tables at the corners, along which microscopes, with adjusted specimens for examination, might be conveyed without danger of maladjustment or injury.

The props were swung out in bundles by the Girondin's crew, lowered on to the Decauville trucks, and pushed by the depot men back through the shed, the empty trucks being returned by another road, and brought by means of the turn-tables to the starting point. The young manager watched the operations and took a tally of the props.

This latter embraces all the machinery, both fixed and rolling; locomotives and cars coming under the latter, and the shop-machines, lathes, planers, and boring-machines, forging, cutting, punching, rolling, and shearing engines, pumps and pumping-engines for the water-stations, turn-tables, and the like, under the former.

Cable cars were whirling on turn-tables, newsboys shouted afternoon editions; hack drivers, flower vendors, train announcers added their babel of strident-toned outcries to the clanging of gongs, the clatter of wheels and hoofs upon cobblestone streets. Ferry sirens screamed; an engine of the Belt Line Railroad chugged fiercely as it pulled a train of freight cars toward the southern docks.

The distance from Esquimalt to Victoria is 75 miles. The line was not quite completed when we went over it; and the buildings, turn-tables, &c. were not yet erected, although some of them were under construction. "The traffic on the line will be light, the country being sparsely settled.

As far as they could make out in the gloom, the arrangement here also was similar to that in France. Lines of narrow gauge tramway, running parallel from the hut towards the water, were connected along the front of the wharf by a cross road and turn-tables. Between the lines were stacks of pit-props, and Decauville trucks stood here and there. But these details they saw afterwards.

It was pierced by four doors, all of which were closed, but out of each of which ran a line of narrow gauge railway. These lines were continued to the front of the wharf and there connected up by turn-tables to a cross line, evidently with the idea that a continuous service of loaded trucks could be sent out of one door, discharged, and returned as empties through another.

In imagination she could hear the engine's whistle, the hissing of the steam from the purge-cocks at starting, the quickening thunder of the high-pressure exhaust, the clanking noise as the slowly moving train passed over the old-fashioned turn-tables, and the long retreating rumble as the express gathered speed and ran out of sight.

The car having then been hauled up a very slight incline out of the water, and monster, double-headed locomotives hitched to it, by gentle grades it and the ship were to be drawn across to the other ocean a hundred miles away, where the ship could be floated again. To obviate any chance of straining the ships, all curves were to be avoided by the use of turn-tables.