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Updated: May 7, 2025
In November Reverdy and I went to Meredosia to see the locomotive which had been shipped from Pittsburgh for Illinois' first railroad. All of the horses and oxen of the neighborhood were required to pull the huge iron thing up the banks of the river; and scores of men in ant-like activity worked about it to place it upon the rails. Douglas was in the crowd, happy and enthusiastic.
The tiny crawling teams each with its puff of dust crawling with it; the great tumbled peaks of the Sierras; the river so far below as to resemble a little stream, the round Cove with its toy houses and its distant ant-like industry all these were plainly to be seized by a glance of whatever eye cared to look.
It was none of her fault since how could she control her father begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder?
The Chows were industrious diggers; they worked with ant-like assiduity from daylight to dark, and often long after that were to be seen at their holes, toiling by the light of lanterns.
Off in this direction was the European city the brightest section, the restaurants and bazaars all lighted up, while the black ant-like forms of people, and the canvas-tops of swiftly moving vehicles, could be seen on the streets. And what a strange mixture of sounds!
Yet I moved silently, and by keeping in the shadow of blackened stumps and withered maize stalks, I reached bow-shot of the commandant's door. Truly one part of my plan had succeeded. The house was the centre of an ant-like swarm skurrying here and there, apparently without method, but with a jerkiness of movement that suggested attack and recoil.
On the double row of flaggings leading up to the summit of the bank, were two ant-like processions of Kentucky folk one, leisurely climbing townward with their bags and bundles, the other hurrying down with theirs to the boat, which was ringing its bell, blowing off steam, and in other ways creating an uproar which seemed to turn the heads of the negro roustabouts and draymen, who bustled around with a great chatter and much false motion.
The price is no object to me." "I don't want you that bad," said Mrs. Dick frankly. "I said no and I'm too busy to say it again." She bustled off with her ant-like celerity, followed by Bostwick's scowls. "You'll have to give up your apartments here," he said to Beth. "I'll find something better at once." "Thank you, I'm very well satisfied," said Beth. "You'll find this town quite overcrowded."
The great majority, ant-like in their indefatigable busyness, neither turned a head nor looked up: backs were bent, eyes fixed, in a hard scrutiny of cradle or tin-dish: it was the earth that held them, the familiar, homely earth, whose common fate it is to be trodden heedlessly underfoot. Here, it was the loadstone that drew all men's thoughts.
In the sunshine-flooded streets, under shelter of the roofs, swarmed an ant-like humanity, dominated by necessities and ideas of the moment which they considered all important, believing with consuming egotism in a superior and omnipotent being watching and directing their goings and comings, as insignificant as the infusoria in a drop of water.
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