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Don't you ever try to think of a great space, nearly as big as this island, all covered over with large houses, the roads between the houses all made of stone, and great bridges going over the rivers, with railway-trains standing? By the way, you have never seen a railway-engine!"
He painted Madame Caballero for nothing, just to get himself talked of among her set; and if it wasn't for Mr. Granger's orders, I don't know where we should be. Come and speak to your aunt, Henery and Arthur, like good boys." This to the olive-branches in the window, struggling for the possession of a battered tin railway-engine with a crooked chimney. "She ain't my aunt," cried the eldest hope.
Beyond doubt it would have been safer to have steadily and fearlessly kept the end in view from the outset: for the full horror of it would have been visible while yet there was time to change our minds. Few people have the nerve to jump from a precipice, or stand in way of a railway-engine, without first shutting their eyes, and perhaps their ears also.
Then, being a young woman of an apparently practical mind, she asked them what they were doing in Albania. They explained. They were travellers from England, wandering for pleasure through the Balkans. They had come from Scutari, as far as they could, in a motor-car. Liosha had never heard of a motor-car. They described it as a kind of little railway-engine that didn't need rails to run upon.
Sometimes you would think he was like a railway-engine, going blindly and helplessly on through a thick and choking mist; and you can see that if there were no ladies present he would let off a few crackers fog-signals, as it were just to bring himself up a bit, and let people know where he was.
Sometimes I divine, when he knits his brows, that he is making an effort to resist suffering, to meet it with a stouter and more cheerful heart. But he does not know how to set about it. If you were asked to lift a railway-engine, you would perhaps make an effort; but you would do so without confidence and without success. So you must not say hard things of Gregoire.
It was as ear-splitting as any whistle of a railway-engine; but whereas the whistle is a clear, mechanical, sharp-edged sound, this was far deeper in volume and vibrant with the uttermost strain of agony and horror. We clapped our hands to our ears to shut out that nerve-shaking appeal. A cold sweat broke out over my body, and my heart turned sick at the misery of it.
At last we were out of the house, rushing through the mud, slush, and half-melted snow, along the wooden track to the railway, laden with bags and coats, and deafened by that melancholy, wailing sound, as though of a huge polar she- bear in the pangs of travail upon an iceberg, which proceeds from an American railway-engine before it commences its work.
It is the whistle of a railway-engine descending the slope from Vietri above us down to Salerno; it is the neighing of the iron horse that has not yet pranced along the unconquered Costiera d’Amalfi, nor befouled its crystal-clear air with his smoky breath.
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