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"When it comes down to hard-pan, I can digest scrap-iron. But just now I've got dyspepsia. Most of what you was sayin' I can't digest. Never trained that way, you see. I like books and poetry, and what time I've had I've read 'em, but I've never thought about 'em the way you have. That's why I can't talk about 'em. I'm like a navigator adrift on a strange sea without chart or compass.
It is not likely that the Mediterranean will ever behold a battle with a greater issue; but when the time comes for another historical fight its bottom will be enriched as never before by a quantity of jagged scrap-iron, paid for at pretty nearly its weight of gold by the deluded populations inhabiting the isles and continents of this planet.
The other day I found myself arrested before a shop-window by a large photograph labelled 'The Heart of New York. It was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you seem to think not justly beyond the scope of attributive sublimity. It was a horror; it set my teeth on edge; it made me think of scrap-iron heaps, heights, pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why scrap-iron!
And on this horseman's gear, like a son of the plains, he used to sleep amongst the tools of his trade, in a litter of rusty scrap-iron, with a portable forge at his head, under the work-bench sustaining his grimy mosquito-net. Now and then I would bring him a few candle ends saved from the scant supply of the manager's house. He was very thankful for these.
"Well," he said, with an air of reflection, "I don't quite think it is; but perhaps I'm prejudiced. I wheeled scrap-iron at the rolling-mills when I was in Montreal." He leaned farther back against the tree, with a little whimsical smile. It was pleasant to appear as a modern Ulysses in the eyes of a very pretty girl, but he had, as she was quick to recognize, taken up the role unconsciously.
As he finished speaking the enemy burst from the bush like a swarm of angry bees, and charged at full speed at the little band of white men opposed to them; whereupon a perfect storm of grape-shot, old nails, rusty bolts, pieces of scrap-iron, and even stones, with which the cannon had been hastily loaded, went hissing through their close ranks; and, from the piercing screams and yells of agony that at once arose from them, the execution must have been terrible.
"Pretty clean sweep this time, eh, Mac?" was the superintendent's greeting, when he had penetrated to the thick of things where McCloskey was toiling and sweating with his men. "So clean that we get nothing much but scrap-iron out of what's left," growled McCloskey, climbing out of the tangle of crushed cars and bent and twisted iron-work to stand beside Lidgerwood on the main-line embankment.
"That's it. Now we'll try your shells. If they're what I think they are, we'll smash that fellow's top works into scrap-iron, and then we'll go for him." "I think I see," said Lennard, "that's why you've half submerged her." "Yes. The Ithuriel is designed to deal with both light and heavy craft. With the light ones, as you have seen, she just walked over them.
"There are many of us in it indirectly. Dunlop, for instance. Niggers in a rubber plantation. Factories in Coventry. A retail shop in High Holborn. And me. All working together. Combining and elaborating in order to give Dot a nasty one on the knee-cap. It's rather a great thought when you come to think it out that way." "I can't see why you want to ride that old job-lot of scrap-iron at all.
"If I had, you'd have been scrap-iron by this time. The sea dropped away from under me, and I had nothing to catch on to. That's all." That's all, d'you call it?" said the thrust-block, whose business it is to take the push of the screw; for if a screw had nothing to hold it back it would crawl right into the engine-room. All I ask for is bare justice.
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