And now small men, shocked by all that has befallen, gather and congratulate themselves on their victory or meditate on and bemoan their losses. The terror of it all! “I say, John,” says the battalion chief of the second division to the battalion chief of the first, “that was something of a fire, eh?” “It was that,” agrees the latter, looking grimly from under the rim of his wet red helmet. “That Dutchman must have had a half-dozen barrels of naphtha or gasoline down there to cause such a blowup as that. Why, that last blast, just before I got here, sent the roof off, they tell me.” “It did that,” returns the other thoughtfully. “There’ll be a big rumpus about it in the papers to-morrow. They ought to inspect these places better.” “That’s right. Well, he got his fill. His wife’s down there now, I think, and his baby. He ain’t been seen since the first explosion.” “Too bad. But they oughtn’t to do such things. They know the danger of it. Still, you never can tell ’em nothin’.” THE CAR YARD If I were a painter one of the first things I would paint would be one or another of the great railroad yards that abound in every city, those in New York and Chicago being as interesting as any. Only I fear that my brush would never rest with one portrait. There would be pictures of it in sunshine and cloud, in rain and snow, in light and dark, and when heat caused the rails and the cars to bake and shimmer, and the bitter cold the mixture of smoke and steam to ascend in tall, graceful, rhythmic plumes that appear to be composed of superimposed circles and spirals of smoke and mist. The variety of the cars. The variety of their contents. The long distances and differing climates and countries from which they have come--the Canadian snows, the Mexican uplands, Florida, California, Texas and Maine. As a boy, in the different cities and towns in which our family dwelt, I was forever arrested by the spectacle of these great freight trains, yellow, white, red, blue, green, toiling through or dissipating themselves in some terminal maze of tracks. I was always interested to note how certain cars, having reached their destination, would be sidetracked and left, and then presently the consignee or his agent or expressman would appear and the car be opened. Ice, potatoes, beef, furniture, machinery, boxed shipments of all kinds, would be taken out by some lone worker who, having come with a wagon, would back it up to the opened door and remove the contents. Most interesting of all to me were the immense shipments of live stock, the pigs, sheep, steers, on their last fatal journey and looking so non-understandingly out upon the strange world in which they found themselves, and baa-ing or moo-ing or squealing in tones that gave evidence of the uncertainty, the distress and the wonder that was theirs.