tion>Benjamin F. Taylor
The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066155490
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I. THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT.
CHAPTER II. THE CONCORD COACH.
CHAPTER III. THE RAGING CANAL.
CHAPTER VI. PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS.
CHAPTER VIII. HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN.
CHAPTER X. RACING AND PLOWING.
CHAPTER XII. SCALDED TO DEATH.
CHAPTER XVI. WORKING "BY THE DAY."
CHAPTER XVII. A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER.
CHAPTER XVIII. DREAMING ON THE CARS.
CHAPTER XIX. "MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT."
CHAPTER XX. THE MAKER OF CITIES.
CHAPTER XXII. HATCHING OUT A WOMAN.
CHAPTER XXIII. A FLANK MOVEMENT.
CHAPTER XXIV. LIGHT AND SHADE.
CHAPTER XXV. PRECIOUS CARGOES.
CHAPTER III. OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER.
CHAPTER IV. OUT-DOOR PREACHING.
CHAPTER V. THE STORY OF THE BELL.
CHAPTER I.
THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT.
The perpetual lever called a wheel is the masterpiece of mechanical skill. At home on sea and land, like the feet of the Proclaiming Angel, it finds a fulcrum wherever it happens to be. It is the alphabet of human ingenuity. You can spell out with the wheel and the lever—and the latter is only a loose spoke of that same wheel—pretty much everything in the Nineteenth Century but the Christian Religion and the Declaration of Independence. Having thought about it a minute more, I am inclined to except the exceptions, and say they translate the one and transport the other.
Were you ever a boy? Never? Well, then, my girl, wasn't one of your first ambitions a finger-ring? And there is your wheel, with a small live axle in it! But whatever you are, did you ever know a boy worth naming and owning who did not try to make a wheel out of a shingle, or a board, or a scrap of tin? Maybe it was as eccentric as a comet's orbit, and only wabbled when it was meant to whirl, but it was the genuine curvilinear aspiration for all that. Boys, young and old, "take to" wheels as naturally as they take to sin. I am sorry for the fellow that never rigged a water-wheel in the spring swell of the meadow brook, or mounted a wind-mill on the barn gable, or drew a wagon of his own make. My sympathies do not extend to his lack of a velocipede, which is nothing if not a bewitched and besaddled wheelbarrow.
In fact, it seems to be the tendency of everything to be a wheel. There's your tumbling dolphin, and there's your whirling world. The conqueror whose hurry set on fire the axles of his chariot was no novelty. Who knows that the Aurora Borealis and the
