SIGHTS IN PEKIN. He hand b'long coldee, all same like ice, He had been glad to abandon the hospitals in favour of a comfortable practice and the leisured life of a country town. Great Wymering had offered him plenty of distractions that soothed the slight wound to his vanity caused by the discovery that he had over-estimated his originality. In a few years much had happened that helped to confirm his new view of himself as a social creature with a taste for the amenities of existence. And then he had been able to keep up his cricket. In the winter there were bridge parties, amateur theatricals, dinner parties with quite ordinary but agreeable people, local affairs into which a man whose health was under suspicion and whose sympathies were just perceptibly narrowing, could plunge without too much effort being required in order to rise to such occasions. And he had the witty temperament. Quite easily, he maintained a reputation for turning out a bon-mot on the spur of the moment, something with a faint element of paradox. He would say such things as, "Only those succeed in life who have brains and can forget the fact," or "To be idle is the goal of all men, but only the industrious achieve it." When taunted by[Pg 46] a young lady who suspected him of wasted talents, even genius, he retorted that "Genius is only an accumulation of neglected diseases." The constable laughed gently and stroked his moustache. His theory about the condition of the individual before him slowly developed. Considered as means for transmitting power, the contrast as to advantages and disadvantages lies especially between belts and gearing instead of between belts and shafts. It is true in extreme cases, such as that cited at Crewe, or in conveying water-power from inaccessible places, through long distances, the comparison lies between belts and shafts; but in ordinary practice, especially for first movers, the problem as to mechanism for conveying power lies between belts and gear wheels. If experience in the use of belts was thorough, as it is in the case of gearing, and if the quality of belts did not form so important a part in the estimates, there would be but little difficulty in determining where belts should be employed and where gearing would be preferable. Belts are continually taking the place of gearing even in cases where, until quite recently, their use has been considered impracticable; one of the largest rolling mills in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, except a single pair of spur wheels as the last movers at each train of rolls, is driven by belts throughout. "On August 14th, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, the expected storm burst; for twenty-five hours the invisible siege-guns poured their torrent of projectiles on the fort. Flares of fire and dense clouds of smoke belched through the crevices. As the enemy's batteries could not be located, their fire could not be answered. The artillerists of the garrison were then taken to the spacious chief gallery, which offered a safe refuge under its vault, about two and a half to three yards thick. Outside the sentries were watching. In the parts near the entrance it was unendurable; the heavy projectiles from the guns mounted in the town had nibbled away the outer wall, only a yard and a half thick. There were as yet no casualties among the garrison; calmly they waited for the infernal tempest to subside and the enemy to storm the fort, for they had sworn to repulse the assault. It is a valley of death now, parched and desolate, a waste of white sand—the dry bone dust of the cycles. But then, when the lava came surging and boiling and flaming across the plain, not a thin stream, but a wide, irresistible current, there was life; there was a city—one city at least. It is there now, under the mass of sharp, gray, porous rock; how much of it no one knows. But it is there, and it has given up its unavailing hints of a life which may have been older than that of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and is as much more safely hidden from the research of the inquiring day as its walls are more hopelessly buried beneath the ironlike stone than are those of the cisalpine cities beneath their ashen drift. "There, you see the nonsense o' giving you as much rations as the others," suggested Alf Russell. "You can't pack 'em, and you wouldn't need 'em if you did pack 'em." "Why, liddle creature?" The reader will readily imagine that this was a relief to Calverley. Even a dagger in the hands of a man possessing the physical strength of Black Jack, was not a weapon to be looked upon with indifference, especially by an unarmed and surprised man. But Calverley, adroitly availing himself of the evident change of purpose in Black Jack, said, in as stern a voice as he could command, "This is strange conduct, master Oakley!" A shriek from the women who had clustered around the treasurer, made matters worse; for, attracted by the noise, the chapel was instantly filled with armed men. HoME大胆美女人体范冰冰
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