The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

The Highland Monthly.
temporary ones, amid rocks and stones, heather and marshy
mosses, man should find it necessary to be so very busy,
that a swarm from the hive of human industry should settle
down, and with pickaxe and shovel undermine here and
bank up there, to force the unyielding rock out of its old
bed into a new one, and the resistless soil out of this spot
into that.
It is true that man puts in more than half his time
transferring himself or some other substance out of one
place into another. Jefferson of New York, who has
jumped about like a house-fly all these years, from hotel to
store and from store to quay, must take a bigger jump across
the seas to Europe or Africa, and when there jump away
as before ; while Macpherson of Britain must needs
betake himself to America or the Indies, and, like his
brother Jefferson, move things himself or help others to
the universal shifting. The wheat which has just been
whirled into Chicago is not allowed to rest there, but must
needs be bundled to the coast, and from there across the
seas to some other coast, then railed again and sent inland
by express as if it had some important appointment to
meet (as indeed it has), and was pressed for time ; then out
of the trucks with it and into carts, and rattled through the
streets until each grain, if it had a voice, would cry out in
sheer worry, " Let me alone ! get me to a mill where I can
have rest and some peace !" Alas, false hope ! In the
mill, the supposed haven of rest, its new conditions are
worse than the old, for it is taken out of one granary into
another, off one floor on to a second, and so on until the
soul is ground out of it, and it is once more stored in bags,
and off it goes again on a new journey. No rest, no peace !
So these hundred and odd men are busy moving things,
for they are building a railway for greater facility in movement
; which railway, when finished, will consist literally of
miscellaneous material taken from many spots, and which
has been shifted about for years, and set down here, for
what extent of permanency none can tell.