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A section of a street is exposed, and you see the foundations of the houses; you see the filthy drains that belched into the common sewers, trapped and retrapped to keep the poison gases down; you see the sewers that rolled their loathsome tides under the streets, amid a tangle of gas-pipes, steam-pipes, water-pipes, telegraph-wires, electric lighting-wires, electric motor-wires, and grip-cables all without a plan, but makeshifts, expedients, devices, to repair and evade the fundamental mistake of having any such cities at all.
And the cabman said that these things were the proof of progress, and by that I knew he had been reading his newspaper, as every intelligent American should. The papers tell their clientele in language fitted to their comprehension that the snarling together of telegraph-wires, the heaving up of houses, and the making of money is progress.
As the superintendent was climbing into his car, the railroad electrician who was in charge of the men guarding the telegraph-wires came up. "One minute, Mr. Kittredge. I've put the box in, according to orders " "What box, and whose orders?" "The recording microphone in Mr. McVickar's office, in there; and by his orders, I guess at least they came from one of his men.
"Yes, it's too easy to get hold of liquids out there, that's the worst of it," the pilot went on. "But for that any booby could manage a ship. He's only got to keep well to the right of Mads Hansen's farm, and he's got a straight road before him. And the deuce of a fine road! Telegraph-wires and ditches and a row of poplars on each side just improved by the local board.
However, the fact being established that the currents from the aurora borealis do have a direct effect upon the telegraph-wires, and that the currents are of both kinds, positive and negative, as I have shown in my remarks upon the aurora of 1852, which sometimes left a dark line upon the prepared paper, and at other times bleached it, it is a natural consequence that the wires should work better without batteries than with them, whenever a current from the aurora has sufficient intensity to neutralize the current from the batteries.
But it is in our own country that the action of the aurora upon the telegraph-wires has been the most remarkable.
While they were in the train, she would tell him not to climb on to the seat of the carriage to look out of the window at the telegraph-poles flying past and the telegraph-wires rising and falling like birds ... she would tell him not to stand at the door in case it should fly open and he should fall out and be killed ... she would tell him, when the train reached the terminus in Belfast, to take tight hold of her hand and not to budge from her side ... she would refuse to cross the Lagan in the steam ferry-boat and insist on going round by tram-car across the Queen's Bridge ... she would tell him not to wander about in Forster Green's when he edged away from her to look at the coffee-mills in which the richly-smelling berries were being roasted.
Looking through them, I saw, for the first time, that two or three telegraph-wires, which I had observed skirting the road, ran directly through the tree in which I was seated. It was a strange sort of sound, that came in hurried jerks, as it were, accompanied with a corresponding jerk of the wire.
Albeit I know the trivial causes for which people employ the telegraph-wires nowadays, I never can get over my primal deadly fear of those yellow envelopes, that seem emblems and messengers of battle, murder, and sudden death. As I tear it open, a hundred horrible impossible possibilities flash across my brain.
In the other villages the destruction was such as is permitted by the usages of war, such as the blowing up of bridges, the burning of the railroad station, and the cutting of telegraph-wires. Not until Bouneville, thirty kilometres beyond Meaux, did I catch up with the Allies. There I met some English Tommies who were trying to find their column.
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