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- 4429
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.981Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 4375
- text
- a bay of the plain formed by the mountains, there rested a great flat
canopy of haze, like a pall. It was the condensed smoke of the chimneys,
with the condensed, exhaled breath of the villagers, prevented from
dispersion by the imprisoning hills. It was too heavy and lifeless to
mount of itself; so there it lay, between the village and the sky,
doubtless hiding many a man with the mumps, and many a queasy child.
My eye ranged over the capacious rolling country, and over the
mountains, and over the village, and over a farmhouse here and there,
and over woods, groves, streams, rocks, fells--and I thought to myself,
what a slight mark, after all, does man make on this huge great earth.
Yet the earth makes a mark on him. What a horrid accident was that on
the Ohio, where my good friend and thirty other good fellows were sloped
into eternity at the bidding of a thick-headed engineer, who knew not a
valve from a flue. And that crash on the railroad just over yon
mountains there, where two infatuate trains ran pell-mell into each
other, and climbed and clawed each other’s backs; and one locomotive was
found fairly shelled, like a chick, inside of a passenger car in the
antagonist train; and near a score of noble hearts, a bride and her
groom, and an innocent little infant, were all disembarked into the grim
hulk of Charon, who ferried them over, all baggageless, to some
clinkered iron-foundry country or other. Yet what’s the use of
complaining? What justice of the peace will right this matter? Yea,
what’s the use of bothering the very heavens about it? Don’t the heavens
themselves ordain these things--else they could not happen?
A miserable world! Who would take the trouble to make a fortune in it,
when he knows not how long he can keep it, for the thousand villains and
asses who have the management of railroads and steamboats, and
innumerable other vital things in the world. If they would make me
Dictator in North America a while, I’d string them up, and hang, draw,
and quarter; fry, roast, and boil; stew, grill, and devil them, like so
many turkey-legs--the rascally numskulls of stokers; I’d set them to
stokering in Tartarus--I would!
Great improvements of the age! What! to call the facilitation of death
and murder an improvement! Who wants to travel so fast? My grandfather
did not, and he was no fool. Hark! here comes that old dragon
again--that gigantic gad-fly of a Moloch--snort! puff! scream!--here he
comes straight-bent through these vernal woods, like the Asiatic cholera
cantering on a camel. Stand aside! here he comes, the chartered
murderer! the death monopoliser! judge, jury, and hangman all together,
whose victims die always without benefit of clergy. For two hundred and
fifty miles that iron fiend goes yelling through the land, crying ‘More!
more! more!’ Would that fifty conspiring mountains would fall atop of
him! And, while they were about it, would they also fall atop of that
smaller dunning fiend, my creditor, who frightens the life out of me
more than any locomotive--a lantern-jawed rascal, who seems to run on a
railroad track, too, and duns me even on Sunday, all the way to church
and back, and comes and sits in the same pew with me, and pretending to
be polite and hand me the prayer-book opened at the proper place, pokes
his pesky bill under my nose in the very midst of my devotions, and so
shoves himself between me and salvation; for how can one keep his temper
on such occasions?
- title
- Chunk 19