osition stand in one
huge shop. A travelling crane runs overhead, and the men have hauled up
one end of a bright vermilion loco. The effect is the silence of a
scornful stare--just such a look as a colonel's portly wife gives
through her _pince-nez_ at the audacious subaltern. Engines are the
"livest" things that man ever made. They glare through their
spectacle-plates, they tilt their noses contemptuously, and when their
insides are gone they adorn themselves with red lead, and leer like
decayed beauties; and in the Jamalpur works there is no escape from
them. The shops can hold fifty without pressure, and on occasion as many
again. Everywhere there are engines, and everywhere brass domes lie
about on the ground like huge helmets in a pantomime. The silence is the
weirdest touch of all. Some sprightly soul--an apprentice be sure--has
daubed in red lead on the end of an iron tool-box a caricature of some
friend who is evidently a riveter. The picture has all the interest of
an Egyptian cartouche, for it shows that men have been here, and that
the engines do not have it all their own way.

And so, out in the open, away from the three great sheds, between and
under more engines, till we strike a wilderness of lines all converging
to one turn-table. Here be elephant-stalls ranged round a half-circle,
and in each stall stands one engine, and each engine stares at the
turn-table. A stolid and disconcerting company is this ring-of-eyes
monsters; 324, 432, and 8 are shining like toys. They are ready for
their turn of duty, and are as spruce as hansoms. Lacquered chocolate,
picked out with black, red, and white, is their dress and delicate lemon
graces the ceilings of the cabs. The driver should be a gentleman in
evening dress with white kid gloves, and there should be gold-headed
champagne bottles in the spick and span tenders. Huckleberry Finn says
of a timber raft, "It amounted to something being captain of that raft."
Thrice enviable is the man who, drawing Rs. 220 a month, is allowed to
make Rs. 150 overtime out of locos Nos. 324, 432, or 8. Fifty yards
beyond this gorgeous trinity are ten to twelve engines who have put in
to Jamalpur to bait. They are alive, their fires are lighted, and they
are swearing and purring and growling one at another as they stand
alone. Here is evidently one of the newest type--No. 25, a giant who has
just brought the mail in and waits to be cleaned up preparatory to
going out afresh.

The ti