CHAPTER VI
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA
In a poem written long ago by Bret Harte the opening of the Pacific Railroad which joined East to West was commemorated in an imagined dialogue between the engines that met midway on the track.
What was it the Engines said,
Pilots touching—head to head,
Facing on the single track,
Half a world behind each back?
This is what the Engines said
Unreported and unread.
Then Bret Harte went on to record the puffing phrases in which each engine described what it brought from the land of its base: the engine from the East, speaking of the shores where the Atlantic beats, and the broad lands of forest and of prairie; and the engine from the West rejoining that it brought to the meeting the storied East:—
All the Orient, all Cathay
Find through me the shortest way.
That parable will find a new application (will have found, perhaps, we should say) in the meeting of
