United States or Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Man had come upon the desert and had gone, leaving only a line of telegraph-poles with their glistening wires, two gleaming parallel rails of burning steel to mark his passing. The thundering Overland Limited, rushing onward like a frightened thing, screamed its terror over the desert whose majesty did not even permit of its catching up the shriek of the panting engine to fling it back in echoes.
"If I know anything about the sense of this meeting," Hill chipped in, "it's going to do a damn sight more'n sling around sympathy." There's telegraph-poles," says Hill, "right across the way!" "Brother Hill is right," Santa Fé went on, "though I am pained that his unhappy disposition to profanity remains uncurbed. The shot that has laid low Brother Hart was a foul one.
Water in large quantity or widely diffused is a fair conductor. Therefore, the glass insulators on the telegraph-poles are cup-shaped usually on the under side where the pin that holds them is inserted, so that the rain may not actually wet this pin, and thus make a water-connection between the wire, glass, pin, pole and ground. We are accustomed to things that are subject to the law of gravity.
You'll wait till I've been and asked her after Lin McLean's health, and till I've saw how the likes of her talks to the likes of me." He made a feeble protest that this would do no one any good. "Sew yourself up, James Lusk. If it has been your idea I come with yus clear from Laramie to watch yus plant telegraph-poles in the sage-brush, why you're off.
They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman. From the beginning he told the tale, the I I I's flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a hair's-breadth.
But we searched the horizon round for the point on the highway where our diligence had failed of the track between the telegraph-poles and softly rolled with us in the muddy waters, like an elephant taking a bath, but, so far from finding it, we could not even find the highway.
Mutilated telegraph-poles and broken straggly wires, evil-smelling pools of water, scattered bricks, torn roadways, and walls blackened and scarred by bomb and shell, completed a scene of mournfulness and desolation. We passed one corner house on the shutters of which some "infanteers" had chalked the inviting saucy sign, "Ben Jonson's Café."
It was still bright sunlight and no spiders were out; in fact, I did not suspect their presence along the line of telegraph-poles, although I ought to have done so, for I continually ran into long strings of tough fine web, which got across my face or hands or rifle barrel. I returned just at sunset and the spiders were out in force.
The stations now were mere board shelters for a commandant and a soldiers' lunch-room; the bridges, timber bridges flung across by the pioneers; and the sawed-off telegraph-poles, spliced between railroad rails to save cutting new ones, were stuck back into the ground like forks.
Was it not Ruskin himself who wanted to butt the railway-train off the track and paw up the rails something like that? But even between them and the landscape there is now an entente cordiale. I have seen the hand of Joseph Pennell make beautiful peace with billboards and telegraph-poles and wires.
Word Of The Day