make their _debut_ on the
morrow, and commence their comparatively brief career of furious
activity--gay things, doomed emphatically to a fast life! Beyond these
young creatures lay a number of aged and crippled engines, all more or
less disabled and sent there for repair; one to have a burst steam-pipe
removed and replaced, another to have a wheel, or a fire-box or a
cylinder changed; and one, that looked as if it had recently "run
a-muck" against all the other engines on the line, stood sulkily grim in
a corner, evidently awaiting its sentence of condemnation,--the usual
fate of such engines being to be torn, bored, battered, chiselled,
clipt, and otherwise cut to pieces, and cast into the furnaces.

While gazing round this apartment, Mrs Marrot's eyes suddenly became
transfixed.

"Wot's the matter _now_?" demanded Bob, in some alarm.

"I _do_ believe--w'y--there's a locomotive _in the air_!" said Mrs
Marrot in an undertone.

"So it is!" exclaimed Bob.

And, reader, so it was. In that shed they had a crane which rested on a
framework overhead, and ran on wheels over the entire shop. It was
capable of lifting above fifty tons' weight and as a large locomotive,
ponderous though it be, is not much over twenty tons, of course this
giant crane made short work of such. When the men have occasion to
remove a wheel from the iron horse, not being able to make it lift up
its leg, so to speak, to have it taken off, they bring it under the
crane, swing it up as a little boy might swing a toy-cart, and operate
on it at their leisure.

Mrs Marrot felt an unpleasant sensation on beholding this. As the wife
of an engine-driver, she had long felt the deepest respect, almost
amounting to reverence, for locomotives, in regard to the weight, speed,
and irresistible power of which she had always entertained the most
exalted ideas. To see one of the race--and that too, of the largest
size--treated in this humiliating fashion was too much for her, she
declared that she had seen enough of the "works," and wouldn't on any
account remain another minute!

"But you won't go without seein' the carriage and truck department,
surely?" said Bob.

"Well, I'll just take a look to please _you_," said the amiable woman.

Accordingly, to the truck and van department they went, and there Bob,
whose mind was sharp as a needle, saw a good many pieces of mechanism,
which formerly he had only seen in a transition state, now applied to
their