Kitabı oku: «Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, December 1878», sayfa 14
"Oh yes, you may go, Georgy," I said with a little laugh. "I am only too happy, I am afraid, if you ask to go anywhere with me."
"Don't take me where it is wet," she observed simply, "for I have on thin slippers;" and she stretched out a little foot.
"I will take care of you," I answered her.
She took up the folds of her full white dress in her hands, and we set out. The mood was upon me to take the old paths across the sloping uplands into the woods on the hill that Helen and I had tramped over so often in our childhood. Beneath us lay the sea, a wide plain of placid waters, blue in the foreground, with opal tints playing over it as it spread out toward the horizon; above us were the woods luxuriant in their midsummer verdure, silent except for the occasional note of a wild bird; and about us were the green fields, fresh mown of late, with thickets of grape and wild convolvulus and star-wreathed blackberry-vines making a luxuriant tangle over the fences.
Georgy walked before me in the narrow path, and I followed closely, watching her fine free movements, the charm of her figure in its plain white morning-dress bound at the waist with a purple ribbon. Her golden-yellow hair lay in curls upon her shoulders: now and then I caught a glimpse of the contour of her face as she half turned to see if I were close behind her. Neither of us spoke for a long time.
My own thoughts flew about like leaves in a wind, but I wondered of what she was thinking. Although I had known her all my life, she was not easy for me to understand; or rather my impressions of her at this time were so colored by the passion of my own hopes that it was impossible for me to find a clew to her real feelings. Perhaps she was thinking of Jack: she was thinking—I was sure she was thinking—of something sweet, sad and strange, or she could not have looked so beautiful.
Suddenly she stopped in her walk and uttered a little cry. "It is wet here," she cried with vexation: "we must turn back, Floyd."
"I said I would take care of you," I exclaimed quickly, and putting my arms about her I raised her and carried her safely over the spot where a hundred springs trickled up to the surface and made a morass of the luxuriant grass. I did not set her down at once. For weeks now, sleeping and waking, I had been haunted by a fierce longing to hold her to my heart as I held her now, and it was not so easy to put by so great a joy. When at last I reached the stile I released her, and she sat down on the stone and looked at me with a half smile.
"If you call that taking care of me, Floyd—" said she, shaking her head.
"You are not angry with me, Georgina?"
"How could I be angry with you?" she said, putting out her hand to me and speaking so kindly that I dared to press her little rosy palm to my lips. "But how strong you are, Floyd! You carried me like a feather's weight, and yet I am tall and very heavy. You know how to take care of me, indeed."
"If I might always take care of you!" I said, my heart beating and the blood rushing to my face. "I can carry you home if you will. Don't you remember about the Laird of Bothwick declaring that no man should marry his daughter save the one who should carry her three miles up the mountain-side? If I could have such a chance with you!"
"But about the daughter of the old laird: did she find a lover so strong as to carry her to the mountain-top?"
"Yes: one of her suitors took her in his arms and strode along, crying, 'Love gives me strength—love gives me speed.' However, he was not happy after all, poor fellow! When he reached the goal he died. How could he have died then?"
"What did the young lady do?" inquired Georgy, laughing. "I suppose another lover rode by her side as she walked home, and that she married him for his pains. That is the way the brave men of the world are rewarded, Floyd. Don't be too generous, nor too strong, nor too self-forgetful. You will gain nothing by it."
"Do you mean that I shall not gain you, Georgy?"
"Oh, I said nothing about myself. Why do you ask me all these questions as soon as we are alone? I am afraid sometimes to let you talk to me, although there are few people in the world whom I like so well to have near me. Women will always love you dearly, Floyd. You are so gentle, so harmonious with pleasant thoughts and pleasant doings: you seem less selfish and vain than other men. You deserve that some woman should make you very happy, Floyd."
"There is but one woman who can do it, Georgy."
"I am not so sure of that. I do not know why you think of me at all: what is it about me that attracts you? Helen is younger than I am—a hundred times more beautiful. No, sir, you need make no such demonstrations. If you like my poor face best, it is because we are old friends, and you are so true, so kind, to the old memories. Do not interrupt me yet. I think you are blind to your own interests when you pass Helen by: she is so rich that if you marry her you can live a life like a prince."
"But if I do not wish to lead a prince's life, Georgy?" said I, a little nettled at the indifference which must prompt such comparisons of Helen to herself. "Nothing could induce me to marry a rich woman, even if Helen were to be thought of by a poor fellow like me. I have no vague dreams about the future: my hopes are clear and definite. I want a career carved by my own industry, my own taste: I want—above all things, I want—the wife of whom I am always thinking."
"And who is she, my poor boy?"
"You know very well, Georgy," I returned, throwing myself beside her and gazing up into her face. "Since I was a little fellow in Belfield, and used to look out of the school-room window with Jack Holt, and see you going past the church with your red jacket and your curls on your shoulders, I have had just one dream of the girl I could love so well that I could die for her. I used to lie on the hilltop then and fancy myself a bold knight on a white steed who should gallop down those sunshiny streets and seize you in his arms, raise you to the saddle and carry you away into Fairyland to live with him for ever. My longing has not changed: I want the same thing still."
"But when I was to marry Jack you did not seem to mind," said Georgina, looking at me with that new pensiveness she had learned of late.
"You knew my heart very little. When Jack told me that you were still free, I hated myself, my joy, my renewal of hope, seemed so contemptibly little in contrast with his great despair. I would not have wronged him. God knows, I pity him when I remember what he has lost! Still, I too loved you as a child: I never had it in my power to serve you, but I had no other thought but you. Why may it not be, dear? Who can love you better than I do? Even although I am not rich, who will take better care of you than I shall? I am sure you love me a little. Do not put the feeling by, but think of it: do not deny it—let it have its chance."
She rose with an absent air. "We must go on," she said dreamily; and I helped her over the stile, and we walked slowly through the wood. She leaned upon my arm, but her face was downcast, and her broad hat concealed it from me.
"I wish," I said after a time, "you would let me know some of those thoughts."
She looked up at me pale but smiling. "Do you know, Floyd," she murmured, "I do think you could make me happy if anybody could."
"Promise me that I may have the chance. End now, Georgy, all your doubts, all my fears. You will be happier so."
"But we should be poor!" she cried sharply. "I could not be contented to marry a poor man. You may be clever, Floyd—I do not know much about cleverness in men—but, all the same, it is hard for a man to make money until he has worked for many, many years. I could not wait for you. I am older than you, and everybody is wondering why, with all my opportunities, I have not married. You'd much better give me up," she added, looking into my face steadily and smiling, although her lip trembled, "and let Mr. Talbot have me. He is rich, and can marry me at once. He is waiting for my answer now, and it is best that I should, as you say, end it all."
I shuddered as this pang disturbed my warm bliss. "For Heaven's sake, don't joke, Georgy!" I exclaimed. "I can't even hear you allude to the possibility of marrying such a man as that with equanimity. I am not so poor. Mr. Floyd—" But, after all, I could not tell her of Mr. Floyd's generosity to me: it seemed like basing calculations upon his death to assure her that the course of events was to bring me a fortune.
She looked at me with eagerness. "Tell me now," she said, putting her hand upon my arm. "If you love me, Floyd, you cannot keep a secret from me."
To describe the beauty of her face, the fascination of her manner, the thrill of her touch, words are quite powerless, mere pen-scratches. If any man could have withstood her, I was not that man. Shame to relate, I soon had told her everything—that Mr. Floyd had for years placed an ample income at my disposal—that I had seen his will, which gave me, without restriction, a clear third of his fortune.
She was meditative for a while. "But," she said then with a trifle of brusqueness, "if you marry me he will be angry and change all that: he does not like me. He has different plans for you: he wants you to marry Helen."
"Don't say that," I cried, "for I love Mr. Floyd so well, I owe him so much, I could refuse him nothing."
"You mean that if he asked you to marry Helen you would give me up, would take her?" she retorted with a flaming color on her cheeks and a gleam in her eyes. "You do not care for me, then. You are merely playing with me: you love her, after all."
"Now, that is nonsense, Georgy," I said gently, for through her jealousy I had the first glimpse, I fancied, of something like real love for me; "and I do not like to hear Helen's name bandied about in this way. You may be sure that she will stand in no need of suitors: I shall never be one of them. Now, then, who is it that is coquetting? You know whom I love—what I want. I am very much in earnest—unsettled in heart and mind, body, soul and spirit, until I have your answer. Tell me, Georgy darling, is it or is it not to be?"
But I was to have no answer that day. Miss Lenox said it was very tiresome hearing me reiterate that dreary question, and that she saw raspberries in the thicket which I must gather for her. Although, when she had eaten them, she let me kiss the lovely stained lips, I was still far enough from knowing whether they were mine or not—whether she liked to raise my ardent dreams merely to disappoint them, or whether at heart it was, as she sometimes hinted, that she did care for me with something of the intimate, clinging habit which bound me so closely to her.
Ellen W. Olney.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
DAWN IN THE CITY
The city slowly wakes:
Her every chimney makes
Offering of smoke against the cool white skies:
Slowly the morning shakes
The lingering shadowy flakes
Of night from doors and windows, from the city's eyes.
A breath through heaven goes:
Leaves of the pale sweet rose
Are strewn along the clouds of upper air.
Healer of ancient woes,
The palm of dawn bestows
On feverish temples peace, comfort on grim despair.
Now the celestial fire
Fingers the sunken spire;
Crocket by crocket slowly creepeth down;
Brushes the maze of wire,
Dewy, electric lyre,
And with a silent hymn one moment fills the town.
Over emergent roofs
A sound of pattering hoofs
And anxious bleatings tells the passing herd:
Scared by the piteous droves,
A shoal of skurrying doves,
Veering, around the island of the church has whirred.
Soon through the smoky haze,
The park begins to raise
Its outlines clearer into daylit prose:
Ever with fresh amaze
The sleepless fountains praise
Morn, that has gilt the city as it gilds the rose.
High in the clearer air
The smoke now builds a stair
Leading to realms no wing of bird has found:
Things are more foul, more fair;
A distant clock, somewhere,
Strikes, and the dreamer starts at clear reverberant sound.
Farther the tide of dark
Drains from each square and park:
Here is a city fresh and new create,
Wondrous as though the ark
Should once again disbark
On a remoulded world its safe and joyous freight.
Ebbs all the dark, and now
Life eddies to and fro
By pier and alley, street and avenue:
The myriads stir below,
As hives of coral grow—
Vaulted above, like them, with a fresh sea of blue.
Charles de Kay.
THE PARIS EXPOSITION OF 1878
IV.—MACHINERY
The machinery in the Paris Exposition covers a larger space than any other of the eight departments of material, machinery and products which occupy the buildings and annexes. The ninth department, Horticulture, is outdoors on the grounds or in greenhouses. Foreign machinery has about half the space, and French machinery the remainder. Few countries are without annexes, the space allotted to each, though supposed to be ample, being utterly insufficient to hold the multitude of objects presented.
In preference to taking the classes of machinery in turn, and visiting the various nations in search of exemplars of the classes in rotation, it will be more interesting to take the nations in order and arrive at an idea of the rate and direction of their relative progress, modified so largely by the respective natural productions of the countries and by the habits and degrees of civilization of their inhabitants. When put to a trial of its strength, each nation naturally brings forward the matters in which it particularly excels.
Prominent in the section of the Netherlands, the name so descriptive of the land where not less than two hundred and twenty-three thousand acres are below the level of the sea and kept constantly drained by artificial means, are the engineering and mechanical devices for the reclamation and preservation of land, the formation of outlet-canals for the centres of commerce, and the bridging of the rivers and estuaries which intersect the maritime portions of the country. Some of the models and relief-maps were shown in the Netherlands section in the Main Building at Philadelphia, but the exhibition is more perfect here, as much has been added in the two intervening years.
The works for the drainage of the Haarlemmer Meer illustrate the means employed for the last great drainage-work completed. This lake had an area of 45,230 acres, an average depth of seventeen feet below low water, and was drained between 1848 and 1853. Being diked to exclude the waters which naturally flowed into it, three large engines were built in different places around it, and the work of pumping out 800,000,000 tons of water commenced. The engines have cylinders of twelve feet diameter, and are capable of lifting 2,000,000 tons of water in twenty-four hours from the depth of seventeen feet to the level of the boezem, or catch-water basin, of the district. The boezem carries the water to the sea, into which it discharges by sluices at Katwyk on the North Sea and at Sparndam and Halfweg on the Y, or the southern end of the Zuyder Zee. The land reclaimed is now in excellent tillage, and one farm on the tract is referred to in agricultural journals as one of the three model farms of the world. The three engines are called the Leeghwater, the Cruquius and the Lynden, from three celebrated engineers who had at different times proposed plans for draining the Haarlemmer Meer. Proposals for its drainage were made by one of these engineers as far back as 1663. The next enterprise in hand is the drainage of the southern lobe of the Zuyder Zee, which is stated to have an average depth of thirteen feet, and it is intended to cut it off by a dike from the northern basin and erect sufficient engines around it to pump it out in thirteen years at the rate of a foot a year, working night and day.
Another engineering device, very necessary in a land where foundations are so frequently built under water, is the enclosed caisson with compressed air, as shown in detail in this exhibit. It was originally invented by M. Triger to keep the water expelled from the sheet-iron cylinders which he sunk through quick-sands in reaching the coal-measures in the vicinity of the river Loire in France. The seams of coal in this district lie under a stratum of quicksand from fifty-eight to sixty-six feet in thickness, and they had been inaccessible by all the ordinary modes of mining previously practised. The system has been much amplified and improved since, especially in sinking the foundations of the St. Louis and the New York East River bridges, and does not require specific description. An improved air-lock, by which access is given from the exterior to the working chamber at the part where the men work in an atmosphere sufficiently condensed to exclude water from the lower open end—like a tumbler inverted in water—is the principal addition which America has made to the device.
We need not go abroad to find long bridges, but the great bridge, with three immense iron trusses and eight smaller ones, over the Wahal near Bommell would be respectable anywhere. Our Louisville bridge is a parallel example for length, but the truss is different.
The dikes and jetties of the new embouchure of the Meuse embrace the same features of extending a river's banks into deep water, and by confining the stream making it scour out its own bed, as now so successfully practised by Captain Eads in one of the passes of the Mississippi River. Limbs and saplings made into gabions and staked together form mattresses, and by loading with stone are sunk in position. They soon become silted up, and are practically solid. Others are made and laid upon them ad libitum, and at last raise the crest above the level of the sea, the last course being laid with the advantage of high-water spring tides. This foundation supports courses of pitched masonry on its side, and these protect the stone or gravel embankment, which forms a roadbed. The river's water, instead of, as formerly, depositing its silt at the embouchure as its motion is arrested on reaching the open sea, carries its silt along and deposits it farther out: if a favorable shore-current occurs, it is swept away laterally, and so disposed of.
The maritime canal of Amsterdam is another late success of this remarkable people, which leads the world in dikes and drainage of low lands, as the Italian does in the art and area of irrigation. The present canal may satisfy the great and still rising commerce of Amsterdam, the previous ship-canal, fifty-one miles in length, built in 1819-25 at a cost of $4,250,000, and deep and wide enough to float two passing frigates, having proved insufficient.
Belgium is happily situated, and well provided by Nature and art to enter into any competitive trial. With admirable skill, great provision of iron and coal and a people of economical habits that permit them to work at low wages without being impoverished, she is, besides working up her own abundant material, rolling the iron of England into rails, and making it into locomotives for Great Britain, whose own people lack the work thus done abroad. The "Société Cockerill-Seraing" has an enormous space devoted to the machinery for the exploitation of iron. Compressed forgings in car-wheels and other shapes are piled on the floor, and a whole railway rail-rolling mill train is shown in motion. Two of the rolls are stated to have rolled 10,500 tons of steel rails, and are in apparent good order yet.
The Belgium system of sinking shafts for mines and wells, invented by Kind and Chaudron, exhibited here as in Philadelphia, attracts great attention from its gigantic proportions. Imagine an immense boring-chisel (trepan), weighing 26,000 pounds and with a breadth of over six feet, worked up and down by machinery, the steel studs on its face stamping the rocks into dust, so that they can be removed with a bucket with bottom valves which is dropped into the hole and is worked up and down until the detritus and water, if any, creep into it, when it is withdrawn and emptied. The repetition of these processes makes the shaft of two mètres diameter. Then comes the larger trepan, with a width of 4.80 mètres, and repeats the process on a larger scale. This enormous chisel weighs 44,000 pounds. The system is much in favor, and forty-five shafts have been thus sunk between 1854 and 1877 in Belgium, France, England and Germany. Cast-iron lining is lowered in sections as the shaft deepens, the sections being added at the top and bolted together.
The Belgian exhibit contains also one of those immense paper-machines invented by the brothers Fourdrinier about fifty years ago, and now used almost universally for the best class of machine-made papers. They are used by Wilcox at Glen Falls, Delaware county, Penn., in making the government note and bond paper, and are a marvel of art. The Frenchmen who invented the machine brought it into use in England, but they were much hampered and discouraged by difficulties, and it was never a pecuniary success to them. It was a legacy to the future, and they have joined the army of martyrs to mechanical science. The machine in the Belgian section is one hundred and thirty feet long, and the Swiss machine, near by, is nearly as large. The French, with their customary ingenuity, have reduced the proportions very considerably. The Swiss machine makes paper one mètre and a half wide.
The remainder of the Belgian exhibit of machinery may be summarized: rock drills on the principle of those used at Mont Cenis; the gas-engines of Otto; machine tools, lathes, drills and planers; a very curious machine for cutting bevel or straight gears, built by a firm at Liège, and worthy of attention by Mr. Sellers or Mr. Corliss, whose ingenious machines for the same purpose were at Philadelphia; the woollen machinery of Celestine Martin of Verviers, which I recollect to have seen in Philadelphia also; multitubular boilers, rudder propeller, and hand fire-engines Then we see a number of locomotives and tramway engines, rail and street cars, winding, mining, crane and portable engines, and a full set of vacuum-pans for sugar, with engines, centrifugal filters and hydraulic presses. A glance at Guibal's great mine-ventilator fan, fifty feet in diameter and with ten wooden vanes, and we may quit the section of Belgium, which is the next largest after England of all the foreign departments here.
The exhibition of Denmark is principally agricultural machinery, its iron ploughs being copies of the English, and its reapers of the American, while the dairy machines and apparatus are its own, and very excellent.
The embroidering-machine of Hurtu & Hautin is shown working in the Swiss section, and is a great success. The web or cloth to be embroidered is stretched between horizontal rollers in a vertical frame which hangs suspended in the machine from the shorter end of a lever above. On each side of this floating frame is a track on which a carriage alternately approaches and recedes. Each carriage carries as many nippers in a row as equals the number of needles, which in this case is two hundred and twelve. The needles have an eye in the middle and are pointed at each end. The carriage advances, the nippers holding the threaded needles, and pushes them through the cloth: the nippers on the other side are waiting to receive them and shut upon them, those which have just thrust them into the cloth opening automatically; the second carriage retreats and draws the silk through the cloth with the requisite tightness, and then comes forward, thrusting the other end of the needles through the cloth to be grasped by the nippers on the first carriage, and so on. The frame holding the cloth is moved by an arrangement of levers under the control of the operator, who conducts a tracer point on the long end of the lever over the design, which is suspended before him. The frame moves in obedience to the action of the tracer, but in a minified degree, and each needle repeats on a scale of one-twentieth the design over which the tracer is moved step by step between each stitch. Thus two hundred and twelve embroideries according to a prescribed pattern are made by each needle; and, in fact, though it was not stated, to avoid complicating the description, a second row of a similar number of needles is carried by the same carriages and operates upon a second web stretched between another pair of rollers in the same floating frame. The object of the rollers is to reel off new cloth as the embroidery progresses and to reel on the work done. A similar machine is shown in the French section, in the Salle de l'École Militaire.
The Jacquard loom is shown in many sections—Swiss, French, United States, English and others—principally upon silk handkerchiefs and motto-ribbons. The exhibit of carpet-weaving is far inferior to the Philadelphian. The Swiss exhibit of machinery for making paper of wood pulp is very large and ample, but the Belgian annex shows the finest and largest varieties of paper so made to be found in the Exposition. The paper, white and of various colors, made from about forty trees and twenty different straws, grasses and forage-plants, is shown in large rolls.
Of Russia there is not much to say except as regards the work of the École Impériale Technique de Moscou. This is a remarkable exemplification of tools, methods of work, parts of engines and machines, all finished with extreme care and fitted with great nicety. It is fuller than it was in Philadelphia, but many of the portions are readily recognizable. The machine tools, hydraulic presses, stationary engines and hand fire-engines are closely associated with the military and naval objects, cannons, ambulances, field-forges and an excellent lifeboat, système de Bojarsky.
Austria comes with no more striking exhibit than the malteries and breweries of Nobak Frères and Fritze. The immense extent of the magazines for barley and hops; the size and height of the malteries, where by continuous processes the grain is damped, sprouted and dried and the malt ground; the number and capacity of the various vessels in which the infusions of malt and hops are made and mixed; and the apparently interminable series of engines, pumps and pipes by which the steam and liquids are conducted,—are confusing until some study evolves order out of the apparent confusion. The wort is cooled artificially, time being a great object as well as the saving of aroma, and the yet innocent liquid is poured in a torrent into the fermentation-vats, where Nature will have her own way and eliminate the ingredients which convert the mawkish wort into the sparkling and refreshing beer. Four hundred and fifty of these establishments have been erected by this firm in Europe; which must be some comfort to those, not vignerons, who think the prospects of the vine are materially clouded by the Phylloxera.
But Austria is not beery alone. She has fine exhibits in horology, electric and pneumatic telegraphy, and in tools, grain-mills, gang-saw mills, and machines for making paper bags. More important, as some might say, are the admirable locomotives and stationary engines, cars, fire-engines, and her collection of iron-work, in which are exhibited cast-iron car-wheels, made by Ganz & Co. of Buda-Pesth, which have been in use twenty-one years and have run without apparent severe injury a distance of 549,108 kilomètres, or nearly 280,700 miles.
The beet-root sugar interest is becoming very important in Austria, but the evidences of the Exhibition indicate that the diffusion-process holds better credit there than in France, where it is not approved of. The rotative apparatus shown is an immense affair, with a series of eight tall tanks arranged on a circular carriage and rotating on a vertical axis, so as to bring each in turn to the charging and discharging positions. Each tank has its own system of pumps. Beet-root is difficult to exploit for various reasons, chemical and other. Like the vine, it is particular in its nutriment, requires great skill to remove extraneous substances, and can hardly be handled by the French system without a set of machinery costing about eighty thousand dollars.
From Austria to Spain is but a step, but it is not productive of much information in the matter we have in hand. A beaming-machine for cotton warps, red, white and yellow, stands solitary in its section, and next to it is a model of a cirque de taureau, composed of nineteen thousand pieces of tin laboriously put together without solder, as if that were a merit, and stated to be the work of two years. In the arena the wooden bull regards with indifference two mounted cavaliers and seven footmen in various provoking attitudes. Near by are various machines and presses for the treatment of grapes and olives, grinders and presses in variety, a sugar-cane press and a turbine. Barcelona would seem to be the most enterprising of Spanish cities. Several exemplifications of the excellent iron of Catalonia and Biscay suggest the direction in which Spain has taken its most important industrial start of late years. An admirable model of the quay of the copper-mining company of the Rio Tinto is another evidence in the same line which the maps, plans and ores amply corroborate.
Two steps, in violation of all preconceived geographical notions, but in obedience to the Exposition authorities, land us in China, where we find things mechanical in much the same state of progress as Marco Polo viewed them some centuries since. The silk tissues brought from the far East were famous in the days of the Roman magnificence, and here is the loom. The marvel is how such a web can be made on such a rough machine. A blue silk warp of delicate threads is in the loom, which has nine heddles, and the partly-finished fabric shows a woof consisting of a narrow gilded strip of paper. The sheen of the figured goods is something remarkable. It is a parallel case to that of the shawls of Kashmir, where the natives, trained for generations, succeed in producing by great care and unlimited expenditure of time fabrics with which the utmost elaboration of our machinery scarcely enables us to compete.
