Now the slow, heavy pant of the engine quickens, and we shoot under bridges and streets, passing out of New York. For a few minutes Buchanan, working the reversing-lever, lets the pistons go the full length of the cylinders, but he gradually cuts down their stroke to eight inches, making the steam expansion do the rest. This lessens the noise from the exhaust, but the noise from the pounding of the mountain of iron on the rails increases in geometrical ratio. A shower of cinders blows in with black smoke, and a hot one settles in my neck. The smoke tastes of oil, the cinder burns--this is but a foretaste of things to come. I turn my head to avoid suffocation and get a scorching blast from the fire-box, whose door is swung wide open. The fireman's orders are to make up the lost time, and he proposes to do it. In goes coal at the rate of two shovelfuls a minute for the first half-hour. Before we reach Albany he has shovelled in more than three tons, and had the day been windy it would have taken more. In the intervals he rakes and prods the white-hot crater and rings the bell as we shoot past towns and cities. Buchanan tends to the whistle and air-brakes. The noise is dreadful, as if a thousand devils were dancing in one's head. The motion is so violent from side to side that we all have to hold on tightly. A little more and one would be seasick. As the hundred-ton engine pounds along with horrible din, a strange sense of exhilaration succeeds that of physical discomfort. One becomes indifferent to everything, and, courting now the smoke-laden hurricane, thrusts one's head from the window into the sweeping air-billows, which dash against the face like breakers and with the same strangling force. I was seized with a wild desire to go faster; seventy miles an hour was not enough, and I would fain have opened everything to its full capacity, stop-cocks, levers, throttle, and all, and taken part in a furious, splendid runaway. Strange thoughts chased through my mind; the houses of flying towns seemed to be rushing at each other in battle from either side, a long line of loose ties between the tracks suggested an endless procession of turtles, the trees seemed to be dancing down the hills, and the people who stared up at us while stepping away from the dangerous suction seemed to be creatures of another race. I have learned since that engineers often have that feeling of belonging to some other world, and it comes upon them particularly at night. A man of highly strung organization could easily go mad riding on an engine running seventy miles an hour.