FORE:"Would you object," said the Clockwork man, "to having all your difficulties solved for you?"In due time the Colonel, with the slave girl, and Harry with her pillow-case of duds, turned toward Fayette, and Gholson and I toward the brigade, at union Church. Then, at last, my old friend and co-religionist let his wrath loose. He began with a flood of curses, lifting high a loaded carbine which we had found with Oliver and which he was ordered to turn in. As he gave his ecstasy utterance it grew; he brandished the weapon like a Bedouin, dug the rowels into his overspent beast and curbed him back to his haunches, fisted him about the ears, gnashed with the pain of his own blows, and howled, and stood up in the stirrups and cursed again. I had heard church-members curse, but they were new church-members, camp converts, and their curses were an infant's cooing, to this. Unwittingly he caused his horse to stumble, and the torrent of his passion gathered force like rain after a peal of thunder; he clubbed the gun to bring it down upon the beautiful creature's head, and when I caught it on the rise he wrenched it from me as if I were a girl, threw it fifty feet away, sprang to the ground and caught it up, fired it in the air, and with one blow against a tree sent the stock flying, threw the barrel underfoot, leapt upon it, tore his hair and his hat, and cursed and champed and howled. I sat holding his horse and feeling my satisfaction rise like the mercury in a warmed thermometer. Contrasting this mood with the cold malignancy and resolve of his temper in the soldiers' room at Sessions's, I saw, to my delight, that our secret was forever imprisoned in his breast, gagged and chained down by the iron of his own inextricable infamy. At dawn he awakened me that he might persuade me to reject the evidences brought against his character by his doings and endurings of the night, and that he might rebuild the old house of words in which habitually he found shelter, too abysmally self-conceited ever to see his own hypocrisy. We breakfasted with the "attatchays"; after which he had barely secured my final assurance that our friendship remained unmarred, when old Dismukes and Harry mounted at the Colonel's tent, and the old brute, as they trotted out into the Gallatin road, beckoned me to join them.
FORE:"In their Machinery Hall they have a very creditable exhibit, considering how recently they have opened the country to the Western world, and how little they had before the opening in the way of Western ideas. There is a small steam-engine of Japanese make; there are two or three looms, some rice-mills, winnowing-machines, an apparatus for winding and spinning silk, some pumps, a hay-cutter, and a fire-engine worked by hand. Then there are several agricultural machines, platform scales, pumps, and a wood-working apparatus from American makers, and there are two or three of English production. In the Agricultural Hall there are horse-rakes, mowers, reapers, and ploughs from America, and there are also some well-made ploughs from Japanese hands. In the Eastern Hall there are some delicate balances for weighing coin and the precious metals; they were made for the mint at Osaka, and look wonderfully like the best French or German balances. The Japanese have been quite successful in copying these instruments, more so than in imitating the heavier scales from America. Fairbanks's scales have been adopted as the standard of the Japanese postal and customs departments. Some of the skilful workmen in Japan thought they could make their own scales, and so they set about copying the American one. They made a scale that looked just as well, but was not accurate as a weighing-machine. As the chief use of a scale is to weigh correctly, they concluded to quit their experiments and stick to Fairbanks's.We listened again. "They've gone the wrong way," I said, still savage.