Even you and I will see the day that steamboats will come up that little

Turkey river to within twenty miles of this land of ours--and in high

water they'll come right to it! And this is not all, Nancy--it isn't

even half! There's a bigger wonder--the railroad! These worms here have

never even heard of it--and when they do they'll not believe in it.

But it's another fact. Coaches that fly over the ground twenty miles an

hour--heavens and earth, think of that, Nancy! Twenty miles an hour.

It makes a main's brain whirl. Some day, when you and I are in our

graves, there'll be a railroad stretching hundreds of miles--all the way

down from the cities of the Northern States to New Orleans--and its got

to run within thirty miles of this land--may be even touch a corner of

it. Well; do you know, they've quit burning wood in some places in the

Eastern States? And what do you suppose they burn? Coal!" [He bent over

and whispered again:] "There's world--worlds of it on this land! You

know that black stuff that crops out of the bank of the branch?--well,

that's it. You've taken it for rocks; so has every body here; and

they've built little dams and such things with it. One man was going to

build a chimney out of it. Nancy I expect I turned as white as a sheet!

Why, it might have caught fire and told everything. I showed him it was

too crumbly. Then he was going to build it of copper ore--splendid

yellow forty-per-cent. ore! There's fortunes upon fortunes of copper ore

on our land! It scared me to death, the idea of this fool starting a

smelting furnace in his house without knowing it, and getting his dull

eyes opened. And then he was going to build it of iron ore! There's

mountains of iron ore here, Nancy--whole mountains of it. I wouldn't

take any chances. I just stuck by him--I haunted him--I never let him

The Gilded Age