It Was Not A Clear Way
Either; For The Bacon, The Lard, The Apples, The Butter, And The Cheese,
In Beautiful Whitewood Barrels, Were Rolling Eastwards Toward The
Steamers Before The Wheat Should Descend On Them.
That is the fifth act
of the great Year-Play for which the stage must be cleared.
On scores of
congested sidings lay huge girders, rolled beams, limbs, and boxes of
rivets, once intended for the late Quebec Bridge - now so much mere
obstruction - and the victuals had to pick their way through 'em; and
behind the victuals was the lumber - clean wood out of the
mountains - logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we pay such
sinful prices in England - all seeking the sea. There was housing, food,
and fuel for millions, on wheels together, and never a grain yet shifted
of the real staple which men for five hundred miles were threshing out
in heaps as high as fifty-pound villas.
Add to this, that the railways were concerned for their own new
developments - double-trackings, loops, cutoffs, taps, and feeder lines,
and great swoops out into untouched lands soon to be filled with men. So
the construction, ballast, and material trains, the grading machines,
the wrecking cars with their camel-like sneering cranes - the whole plant
of a new civilisation - had to find room somewhere in the general rally
before Nature cried, 'Lay off!'
Does any one remember that joyful strong confidence after the war, when
it seemed that, at last, South Africa was to be developed - when men laid
out railways, and gave orders for engines, and fresh rolling-stock, and
labour, and believed gloriously in the future?
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