"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 enough of that truck along in there on the line of the

pocket-knife, from Hail Columbia to Hark-from-the Tomb to fat up all the

consumptives in all the hospitals from Halifax to the Holy Land. It just

grows like weeds! I've got a little belt of sassparilla land in there

282

The Gilded Age