procession of more sedately pacing
Englishmen, and in three short minutes you are left absolutely alone
among arrested wheels and belts, pulleys, cranks, and cranes--in a
silence only broken by the soft sigh of a far-away steam-valve or the
cooing of pigeons. You are, by favour freely granted, at liberty to
wander anywhere you please through the deserted works. Walk into a huge,
brick-built, tin-roofed stable, capable of holding twenty-four
locomotives under treatment, and see what must be done to the Iron Horse
once in every three years if he is to do his work well. On reflection,
Iron Horse is wrong. An engine is a she--as distinctly feminine as a
ship or a mine. Here stands the _Echo_, her wheels off, resting on
blocks, her underside machinery taken out, and her side scrawled with
mysterious hieroglyphics in chalk. An enormous green-painted iron
harness-rack bears her piston and eccentric rods, and a neatly painted
board shows that such and such Englishmen are the fitter, assistant, and
apprentice engaged in editing that _Echo_. An engine seen from the
platform and an engine viewed from underneath are two very different
things. The one is as unimpressive as a cart; the other as imposing as a
man-of-war in the yard.

In this manner is an engine treated for navicular, laminitis,
back-sinew, or whatever it is that engines most suffer from. No. 607, we
will say, goes wrong at Dinapore, Assensole, Buxar, or wherever it may
be, after three years' work. The place she came from is stencilled on
the boiler, and the foreman examines her. Then he fills in a hospital
sheet, which bears one hundred and eighty printed heads under which an
engine can come into the shops. No. 607 needs repair in only one hundred
and eighteen particulars, ranging from mud-hole-flanges and blower-cocks
to lead-plugs, and platform brackets which have shaken loose. This
certificate the foreman signs, and it is framed near the engine for the
benefit of the three Europeans and the eight or nine natives who have to
mend No. 607. To the ignorant the superhuman wisdom of the examiner
seems only equalled by the audacity of the two men and the boy who are
to undertake what is frivolously called the "job." No. 607 is in a
sorely mangled condition, but 403 is much worse. She is reduced to a
shell--is a very elle-woman of an engine, bearing only her funnel, the
iron frame and the saddle that supports the boiler.

Four-and-twenty engines in every stage of decomp