The "long-shop," so named from its peculiar shape, very long and narrow, is devoted wholly to repairing and rebuilding engines. Such small complaints as leaking valves and broken springs and castings may be repaired in the roundhouse, as the family medicine-chest avails for minor ailments; but for more serious injuries the engines must be taken to the experts in the long shop, and placed on one of the operating-tables there, and taken apart and put together and made fit for service again. When the injuries are too severe--when, in other words, it would cost more to rebuild the engine than the engine is worth--it is shoved along a rusty track back of the shop into the cemetery called the "bone-yard," and there eventually dismantled, knocked to pieces, and sold for "scrap." That is the sordid fate, which, sooner or later, overtakes the proudest and swiftest empress of the rail. In the long-shop, four or five engines are always jacked up undergoing repairs; each of them has a special gang of men attached to it, under a foreman whose sole business it is to see that that engine gets back into active service in the shortest possible time. To the inexperienced eye, the shop was a perfect maze of machinery. Great cranes ran overhead, with chains and claws dangling; shafting whirred and belts rattled; along the walls were workbenches, variously equipped; at the farther end were a number of drills, and beyond them a great grindstone which whirred and whirred and threw out a shower of sparks incessantly, under the guidance of its presiding genius, a little, gray-haired man, whose duty it was to sharpen all the tools brought to him. There was a constant stream of men to and from the grindstone, which, in consequence, was a sort of centre for all the gossip of the shops. Once the grindstone had burst, and had carried the little man with it through the side of the shop, riding a great fragment much as Prince Feroze-shah rode his enchanted horse; and though there was no peg which he could turn to assure a safe landing, he _did_ land safely, and next day superintended the installation of a new stone, from which the sparks were soon flying as merrily as ever. And even if the visitor was not confused by this tangle of machinery, he was sure to be confounded by the noise, toward which every man in the shop contributed his quota. The noise!--it is difficult to give an adequate idea of that merciless and never-ceasing din. Chains clanked, drills squeaked, but over and above it all was the banging and hammering of the riveters, and, as a sort of undertone, the clangour from the boiler-shop, connected with the long-shop by an open arch. The work of the riveters never paused nor slackened, and the onlooker was struck with wonder and amazement that a human being could endure ten hours of such labour!