Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
When the foreign steamer comes to the wharf, you see the long line of sailors, with shouldered mail-bags, coming down the planks, carrying as many letters as you might suppose would be enough for a year's correspondence, and this repeated again and again during the week.
The mail-steamer was the even then antiquated Moor of the Union Line, and she was lying a quarter of a mile away from the docks, awaiting her mail-bags and her important passengers. Besides Mrs. Harry Lawson and ourselves, Mr. Rhodes, Mr. Beit, and Dr.
But if there be a country which cannot stand any one of these tests, a country where knowledge cannot be diffused without perils of mob-law and statute-law, where speech is not free, where the post-office is violated, mail-bags opened, and letters tampered with, where public debts and private debts outside of the State are repudiated, where liberty is attacked in the primary institution of their social life, where the position of the white woman is injuriously affected by the outlawry of the black woman, where the arts, such as they have, are all imported, having no indigenous life, where the laborer is not secured in the earnings of his own hands, where suffrage is not free or equal, that country is, in all these respects, not civil, but barbarous, and no advantages of soil, climate, or coast can resist these suicidal mischiefs.
Then we smoked a final pipe, and swapped a final yarn; after which, we put the pipes, tobacco and bag of coin in snug holes and caves among the mail-bags, and then fastened down the coach curtains all around, and made the place as "dark as the inside of a cow," as the conductor phrased it in his picturesque way. It was certainly as dark as any place could be nothing was even dimly visible in it.
Mail-bags were tossed on and off, a few packages handled by the Wells Fargo man, and the train pulled out. Conniston leaned back with a sigh. "Roger," he said, at last, "I've got a proposition to make." "Well?" "Let's drop off at one of these dinky towns and see what it's like. I've a notion we might find something new." "That's a real joke, I suppose?" "Not at all," maintained Conniston.
Warming up to the subject, flapping his arms aloft like a pair of wings, he recounted, with some dramatic fervor, what he called the "lonely ride of the tried servant of the Government over the rude passes of the mountains," recounting the risks which these faithful men ran; then he referred to the sanctity of the United States mails, reminding the jury and the audience particularly the audience of the chaos which would ensue if these sacred mail-bags were tampered with; "the stricken, tear-stained face of the mother," for instance, who had been waiting for days and weeks for news of her dying son, or "the anxious merchant brought to ruin for want of a remittance which was to tide him over some financial distress," neither of them knowing that at that very moment some highwayman like the prisoner "was fattening off the result of his theft."
The latter found there a very dangerous condition of things and reported to Captain Smith, who then sent him to the mail-room; and here again, it was easy to see, matters looked very serious. Mail-bags were floating about and the water rising rapidly. All this was reported to the captain, who ordered the lifeboats to be got ready at once. Mr.
But the storm passed away and the effervescence returned though not, it is pleasing to add, with so much pungency as before. Thus, night and day, the steamer sped on over the southern seas, across the mystic line, and into the northern hemisphere, with the written records, hopes, commands, and wishes of a continent in the mail-bags in her hold, and leaving a beautiful milky-way behind her.
We were coated with it like millers; so were the coach, the mules, the mail-bags, the driver we and the sage-brush and the other scenery were all one monotonous color. Long trains of freight wagons in the distance envelope in ascending masses of dust suggested pictures of prairies on fire. These teams and their masters were the only life we saw.
The coach was stopping just then by another wayside inn, to exchange mail-bags and water the horses, and favoured by the gathering dusk, a sharp business transaction at once went into effect between the young lady within and some one without; wherof nothing at first transpired. Mr. Kingsland knew only that on one side the tones might rival a mountain brook for their soft impetuosity.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking