Little Turrets Are Better Than This, Or Even Brown
Battlements Made Of Mortar.
Except in America I do not remember to
have seen these vicious bits of white timber - timber painted white -
plastered on to the fronts and sides of red brick houses.
Again we went on by rail to Buffalo. I have traveled some
thousands of miles by railway in the States, taking long journeys
by night and longer journeys by day; but I do not remember that
while doing so I ever made acquaintance with an American. To an
American lady in a railway car I should no more think of speaking
than I should to an unknown female in the next pew to me at a
London church. It is hard to understand from whence come the laws
which govern societies in this respect; but there are different
laws in different societies, which soon obtain recognition for
themselves. American ladies are much given to talking, and are
generally free from all mauvaise honte. They are collected in
manner, well instructed, and resolved to have their share of the
social advantages of the world. In this phase of life they come
out more strongly than English women. But on a railway journey, be
it ever so long, they are never seen speaking to a stranger.
English women, however, on English railways are generally willing
to converse: they will do so if they be on a journey; but will not
open their mouths if they be simply passing backward and forward
between their homes and some neighboring town. We soon learn the
rules on these subjects; but who make the rules? If you cross the
Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her
before the journey is over. Travel with the same woman in a
railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in
your own mind in quite other language than that of love.
And now for Buffalo, and the elevators. I trust I have made it
understood that corn comes into Buffalo, not only from Chicago, of
which I have spoken specially, but from all the ports round the
lakes: Racine, Milwaukee, Grand Haven, Port Sarnia, Detroit,
Toledo, Cleveland, and many others. At these ports the produce is
generally bought and sold; but at Buffalo it is merely passed
through a gateway. It is taken from vessels of a size fitted for
the lakes, and placed in other vessels fitted for the canal. This
is the Erie Canal, which connects the lakes with the Hudson River
and with New York. The produce which passes through the Welland
Canal - the canal which connects Lake Erie and the upper lakes with
Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence - is not transhipped, seeing that
the Welland Canal, which is less than thirty miles in length, gives
a passage to vessels of 500 tons. As I have before said,
60,000,000 bushels of breadstuff were thus pushed through Buffalo
in the open months of the year 1861. These open months run from
the middle of April to the middle of November; but the busy period
is that of the last two months - the time, that is, which intervenes
between the full ripening of the corn and the coming of the ice.
An elevator is as ugly a monster as has been yet produced. In
uncouthness of form it outdoes those obsolete old brutes who used
to roam about the semi-aqueous world, and live a most uncomfortable
life with their great hungering stomachs and huge unsatisfied maws.
The elevator itself consists of a big movable trunk - movable as is
that of an elephant, but not pliable, and less graceful even than
an elephant's. This is attached to a huge granary or barn; but in
order to give altitude within the barn for the necessary moving up
and down of this trunk - seeing that it cannot be curled gracefully
to its purposes as the elephant's is curled - there is an awkward
box erected on the roof of the barn, giving some twenty feet of
additional height, up into which the elevator can be thrust. It
will be understood, then, that this big movable trunk, the head of
which, when it is at rest, is thrust up into the box on the roof,
is made to slant down in an oblique direction from the building to
the river; for the elevator is an amphibious institution, and
flourishes only on the banks of navigable waters. When its head is
ensconced within its box, and the beast of prey is thus nearly
hidden within the building, the unsuspicious vessel is brought up
within reach of the creature's trunk, and down it comes, like a
musquito's proboscis, right through the deck, in at the open
aperture of the hole, and so into the very vitals and bowels of the
ship. When there, it goes to work upon its food with a greed and
an avidity that is disgusting to a beholder of any taste or
imagination. And now I must explain the anatomical arrangement by
which the elevator still devours and continues to devour, till the
corn within its reach has all been swallowed, masticated, and
digested. Its long trunk, as seen slanting down from out of the
building across the wharf and into the ship, is a mere wooden pipe;
but this pipe is divided within. It has two departments; and as
the grain-bearing troughs pass up the one on a pliable band, they
pass empty down the other. The system, therefore, is that of an
ordinary dredging machine only that corn and not mud is taken away,
and that the buckets or troughs are hidden from sight. Below,
within the stomach of the poor bark, three or four laborers are at
work, helping to feed the elevator. They shovel the corn up toward
its maw, so that at every swallow he should take in all that he can
hold. Thus the troughs, as they ascend, are kept full, and when
they reach the upper building they empty themselves into a shoot,
over which a porter stands guard, moderating the shoot by a door,
which the weight of his finger can open and close.
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