"Iron horse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... choice. He begged for a glass of milk, after trying that green hued compound called coffee, and made his breakfast out of that and some hard crackers which seemed to have been imported into Ilium before the introduction of the iron horse, and to have withstood a ten years siege of regular boarders, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Pot Anns, tha mun alter thi plans, For tha niver can get 'em i' force; For I'm happy to tell at astead o'th' canal They're baan to try th' big iron horse. ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... water stood high in the glass, and Allan did not reduce the speed, although he cut the link action another notch to get every ounce of advantage from the expansion. Down the field they went, the big iron horse shouldering itself irresistibly along, while the ploughs left their dozen furrows of moist, fresh soil, and the blackbirds hopped gingerly behind. But the water went down, down in the glass, and still there was no sign of a further supply. Allan ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... Our way to Bayeux was strewn thick with these Normandy jewels; with towns smaller than Caen; with Gothic belfries; with ruined priories, and with castles, stately even when tottering in decay. When the last castle was lost in a thicket, we discovered that our iron horse was stopping in the very middle of a field. If the guard had shouted out the name of any American city, built overnight, on a Western prairie, we should have felt entirely at home in this meadow; we should have known any clearing, with grass ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... "The Texas." "The General" kept on to the rear, but at a slow pace. No longer did the staunch machine respond to the throttle. The fire in the furnace was burning low; there was little or no steam; the iron horse was spent and lame. ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... and answered: "Yes, little girl, the nice red apples are for those who pick them; and you will have a ride on the iron horse if you ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... business putting the unlucky tricycle in order. Jeffreys was not a mechanic. All he could do was to put the parts together in a makeshift way, and by straightening some of the bent parts and greasing some of the stiff parts restore the iron horse into a gloomy semblance of his ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... work threshing, and in winter drives chaff-cutters for the larger farmers. Occasionally it draws a load of coal in waggons or trucks built for the purpose. Hodge's forefathers knew no rival at plough time; after the harvest they threshed the corn all the winter with the flail. Now the iron horse works faster ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... there; hardly as glad to be there so soon. There are lands made to be skimmed, tame samenesses of plain or weary wastes of desert, where even the iron horse gallops too slow. Japan is not one of them. A land which Nature herself has already crumpled into its smallest compass, and then covered with vegetation rich as velvet, is no land to hurry over. One may well linger where each mile builds the scenery afresh. And in this ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... myself carefully, and put the little suit his father liked best on Willie! Then, seating myself and taking my baby on my lap, I rocked him and told him stories to while the time away till I heard the tramp of the iron horse. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... now, and long has been. To-day the iron horse, with its rattling train, carries such travellers by a different route—the screech of its whistle being just audible to wayfarers on the old road, as in mockery of their crawling pace. Of its ancient glories there remain only the splendid causeway, still kept in repair, ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... the following excerpt may enable some of your readers and Folklore collectors to testify to the yet lingering existence, in localities still unvisited by the "iron horse," of a superstition similar to the one referred to below. I transcribe it from a curious, though not very rare volume in duodecimo, entitled Choice and Experimental Receipts in Physick and Chirurgery, as also Cordial ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 39. Saturday, July 27, 1850 • Various
... our industrial machines, demands, on the one hand, the renovation of its organism, which wears out with movement, and, on the other, the maintenance of the heat transformed into action. We can compare it with the locomotive-engine. As the iron horse performs its work, it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time. The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with 'plastic food,' the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... BEER attacking the railways said they were already beginning to eat the bitter fruits of them. He was thinking of trekking to Damaraland, and his children would trek still further into the wilderness out of the reach of the iron horse. ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... drove away just as eighteen years before Victoria and Albert had driven away—the same state, the same popular excitement, in kind if not in degree, and, let us trust, a like amount of love and joy. But this happy pair did not drive all the way to Windsor. The waiting train, the iron horse snorting with impatience, showed how the world had moved on since that other wedding; but the perennial Eton boys were on hand for these lovers also, wearing the same tall hats and short jackets, cheering in the same mad way, so that the ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... on the trolley heard the wild, triumphant scream of the iron horse whistling for Hillier. The three directors of Le Roi had been warned by wire, and were waiting, ready ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... to the battle, When a score of miles away, He has come to the feast and banquet, By the iron horse, to-day. Its pace is not much swifter Than the pace of that famous steed Which bore him down to the contest And saved the day ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the red Indians will soon be a thing of the past. Civilisation is reaching this people, and the iron horse rushes and shrieks where the Indian trail was once the only pathway. The picturesque garb is fast disappearing, and store clothes, often too soon transformed into rags anything but picturesque, have robbed, the Indian of the interest that once ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... first steamboat came up this river?" I answered, "Yes, oh yes! most distinctly do I remember it." And then we talk of the event, and recall the many pleasant things connected with it, when, lo! a whistle, and the loud puffing and snorting of the iron horse! Captain Newson, standing near and listening to our conversation, exclaimed, pointing over to Mendota, "And there goes the first train of cars that ever started out from ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... a pleasant seat on the shady side, hung the basket in a rack, opened a window; and very soon the iron horse, which fed on fire, rushed, snorting and shrieking, away from the depot. Dotty felt as if she had a pair of wings on her shoulders, or a pair of seven-league boots on her feet; at any rate, she was whirling through space without any will of her own. The ...
— Dotty Dimple Out West • Sophie May
... these merciless innovators. The glassy river still glides on in its natural bed, and even the willows on its banks, from which the village takes its name, are suffered to stand, unscathed by the woodman's axe. The "iron horse" has never disturbed the inhabitants by his shrill voice, and the rattling of cars has not broken upon the stillness of a summer-day. The village is not on the direct route from any of the principal cities to others, consequently the inhabitants suffer ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... sight of so many elephants, which gave the enemy such a tremendous superiority. Aristatalis, and some other ingenious counsellors, were requested to consult together to contrive some means of counteracting the power of the war-elephants, and they suggested the construction of an iron horse, and the figure of a rider also of iron, to be placed upon wheels like a carriage, and drawn by a number of horses. A soldier, clothed in iron armor, was to follow the vehicle—his hands and face besmeared with combustible matter, and this soldier, armed with a long staff, was ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... on the Charleston course. The establishment of a Southern gentleman is not complete until it includes one or two of these useless appendages. I had an argument with my host as to their value compared with that of the steam-engine, in which I forced him to admit that the iron horse is the better of the two, because it performs more work, eats less, has greater speed, and is not liable to the spavin or the heaves; but he wound up by saying, "After all, I go for the thorough-breds. You Yankees have ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... to see the return of those stirring days, I'm free to assert that the world lost something good, and that it was not all clear gain when the old four-in-hand Royal Mail coaches drove out of the present into the past, and left the Iron Horse in possession ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... so successfully. He set to work at once to read the secret inscriptions on the ring, but he spent seven weeks before he could accomplish it. He then gave the young man the following instructions how to destroy the Northern Frog:—"You must have a great iron horse cast, with small wheels under each foot, so that it can be moved backwards and forwards. You must mount this, and arm yourself with an iron spear two fathoms long, which you will only be able to wield when you ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... instantly sunk. Another and another are tried, but they are all swallowed up by the angry waters. A large one might possibly survive; but none is at hand. Away to Buffalo a car is despatched, and never did the iron horse thunder along its steel-bound track on such a godlike mission. Soon the most competent life- boat is upon the spot. All eyes are fixed upon the object, as trembling and tossing amid the boiling white waves it survives the roughest waters. One breaker past and it will have reached ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... will see that a railroad to join California to the Eastern states was a great necessity and had often been talked of. Several ways to bring the iron horse puffing across the plains and up the mountains with his long train of cars had been laid out on paper. The emigrants had found that the best highway from the Missouri River to California was to keep along the Platte River in Nebraska to Fort Laramie and the ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... by Orientals who for uncounted centuries have plodded along in perfect contentment, and who now find that the whole order of living to which they and their fathers have become adapted is being shaken to its foundation by the iron horse of the foreigner? Millions of coolies earn a living by carrying merchandise in baskets or wheeling it in barrows at five cents a day. A single railroad train does the work of a thousand coolies, and thus deprives them of their means of support. Myriads of farmers grew ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... not undervalue ourselves—which would, in fact, be to undervalue our Creator—for such shortcomings. Though into our iron horse's skull or cab we have to put one or two living men to supply its deficiency of understanding, it is nevertheless a recognizable animal, of a very grand and somewhat novel type. Its respiratory, digestive, and muscular systems are respectable; and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... notch for. Buffalo hunting, a sport for kings, thy time has passed. Where once they roamed by the thousands now rises the chimney and the spire, while across their once peaceful path now thunders the iron horse, awakening the echoes far and near with bell and whistle, where once could only be heard the sharp crack of the rifle or the long doleful yelp of the coyote. At the present time the only buffalo to be found are in the private parks ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... railway-line from Sari to Amoz. There are immense anthracite coal-fields at the head of the gulf not far from Sari, and the railway will tap these. Some of his students are working on a locomotive now. It will be a strange sight to see an iron horse puffing through the primeval jungles of the stone age, while cave bears, saber-toothed tigers, mastodons and the countless other terrible creatures of the past look on from their tangled ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... cut for two miles through the solid rock, and its unruffled waters, contrasting with the boiling river struggling through the narrow gorge, look like streams of Peace and Passion flowing and struggling side by side. As the "iron horse" hurries us onward, the ears are assailed, amid the wild majesty of Nature, with the puny cockneyisms of "Rome," "Syracuse," &c. Such absurdities are ridiculous enough in our suburban villas; but to find them substituted for the glorious old Indian ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... from his haunts. Soon he availed himself of the same pattern to tell stories of animals domesticated and in close contact with man; and thus he gave us the 'Walking Delegate' and the 'Maltese Cat.' In time betook a further step and applied to the iron horse of the railroad the method which had enabled him to set before us the talk of the polo pony and of the blooded trotter; and thus he was led to compose '007,' in which we see the pattern of the primitive beast-fable so stretched as to enable ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... proved among the greatest, as well as the latest, of the agents of destruction. In our island various cherished antiquities have been often most unnecessarily swept away in constructing these race-courses for the daily rush and career of the iron horse. His rough and ponderous hoof, for example, has kicked down, at one extremity of a railway connected with Edinburgh (marvellously and righteously to the dispeace of the whole city), that fine old specimen ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... The Iron Horse has reached at last Cayuga's heights so near; Look out, ye men of Brantford, now, for soon he will be here! He brings with him a weighty load, his way before him feels, As slowly o'er the new-laid track ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... extended 23,000 miles and reaches the remotest parts of the land. These throbbing arteries carry life and enterprise to all portions of India; and many regions not yet made thus accessible will soon listen to the neigh of the iron horse and feel the pulsations of new life thereby. Three hundred million pounds sterling have been expended in this ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones |
