OCR Text |
Show "ROUND ABOUT THE EARTH." European railroad directors recently met in Paris, their business being the arranging of the details for through regular trains from Paris to Peking. The trip is to be made in nineteen against thirty-two days by the most direct sea route. It is further stated that arrangements are being perfected with the Atlantic and Pacific steamship companies and American railroad companies com-panies for close connections so that round trip tickets can be sold and the world spanned in fifty days. This old world of ours is shrinking, sure enough. A good many people remember distinctly distinct-ly when it required three years for a Yankee whaler to make the trip from New Bedford to Bering Sea and return. Now the world is to be rounded in fifty days. Two great continents, two great oceans, and with the ships now building and with some needed improvements in the Siberian Sibe-rian railroad, the fifty days will probably in the next five years be cut down seven days more. When Puck said he would put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes he was not dreaming. The light had come to Shakespeare's imagination even as sometimes a tune comes to the inner consciousness of men long before they can give it expression on their lips. But when Watt heard the first respiration of the first steam engine, the chances are that he did not once think of anything beyond running a factory with it. He lacked the great poet's fancy, but his invention is about to girdle the earth in forty days. |