In my
time, when carriages of the English type were in use, the atmosphere
after an hour's run was as thick as a dense London November fog, and
after five or six hours' travelling the passengers alighted with faces
as black as niggers'. Whilst waiting for a train, its approach would
be announced by a vast pillar of dust appearing in the distance. This
pillar of dust seemed almost to reach the sky, and any passengers of
Hebraic origin must really have imagined themselves back in the Sinai
peninsula, and must have wondered why the dusky pillar was approaching
them instead of leading them on.
The difficulties connected with the working of railways did not end
here. Most people know that a swarm of locusts can stop a train, for
the bodies of these pests are full of grease, and after the
engine-wheels have crushed countless thousands of locusts, the wheels
become so coated with oil that they merely revolve, and refuse to grip
the rails. Let the driver open his sand-box never so widely, the
wheels cannot bite, and so the train comes to a standstill. Oddly
enough, a bird, too, causes a great deal of trouble. The "oven-bird"
makes a large domed nest of clay, the size of a cocoa-nut. In that
treeless land the oven-birds look on telegraph-posts as specially
provided by a benign Providence to afford them eligible nesting-sites,
and from some perversity of instinct, or perhaps attracted by the
gleam of the white earthenware, they invariably select one of the
porcelain insulators as the site of their future home, and proceed to
coat it laboriously with clay, thus effectually destroying the
insulation.
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