“Aha, my girl, don’t you see?  Things ain’t so dark, are they?  Now I didn’t forget the railroad.  Now just think for a moment—­just figure up a little on the future dead moral certainties.  For instance, call this waiter St. Louis.

“And we’ll lay this fork (representing the railroad) from St. Louis to this potato, which is Slouchburg: 

“Then with this carving knife we’ll continue the railroad from Slouchburg to Doodleville, shown by the black pepper: 

“Then we run along the—­yes—­the comb—­to the tumbler that’s Brimstone: 

“Thence by the pipe to Belshazzar, which is the salt-cellar: 

“Thence to, to—­that quill—­Catfish—­hand me the pincushion, Marie Antoinette: 

“Thence right along these shears to this horse, Babylon: 

“Then by the spoon to Bloody Run—­thank you, the ink: 

“Thence to Hail Columbia—­snuffers, Polly, please move that cup and saucer close up, that’s Hail Columbia: 

“Then—­let me open my knife—­to Hark-from-the-Tomb, where we’ll put the candle-stick—­only a little distance from Hail Columbia to Hark-from-the-Tomb—­down-grade all the way.

“And there we strike Columbus River—­pass me two or throe skeins of thread to stand for the river; the sugar bowl will do for Hawkeye, and the rat trap for Stone’s Landing-Napoleon, I mean—­and you can see how much better Napoleon is located than Hawkeye.  Now here you are with your railroad complete, and showing its continuation to Hallelujah and thence to Corruptionville.

“Now then-them you are!  It’s a beautiful road, beautiful.  Jeff Thompson can out-engineer any civil engineer that ever sighted through an aneroid, or a theodolite, or whatever they call it—­he calls it sometimes one and sometimes the other just whichever levels off his sentence neatest, I reckon.  But ain’t it a ripping toad, though?  I tell you, it’ll make a stir when it gets along.  Just see what a country it goes through.  There’s your onions at Slouchburg—­noblest onion country that graces God’s footstool; and there’s your turnip country all around Doodleville —­bless my life, what fortunes are going to be made there when they get that contrivance perfected for extracting olive oil out of turnips—­if there’s any in them; and I reckon there is, because Congress has made an appropriation of money to test the thing, and they wouldn’t have done that just on conjecture, of course.  And now we come to the Brimstone region—­cattle raised there till you can’t rest—­and corn, and all that sort of thing.  Then you’ve got a little stretch along through Belshazzar that don’t produce anything now—­at least nothing but rocks—­but irrigation will fetch it.  Then from Catfish to Babylon it’s a little swampy, but there’s dead loads of peat down under there somewhere.  Next is the Bloody Run and Hail Columbia country—­tobacco enough can be raised there to support two such railroads.  Next is the sassparilla region.  I reckon there’s