hem.
Some carry six freight-cars, some carry eight, and some carry ten cars.
Tiny little propellers that we call "tug-boats" are warped or hitched
alongside of these clumsy floating boxes, where they look as a little
kitten would appear beside a big St. Bernard dog, or as a locomotive
would look beside a house. But our queer, snorting, fussy little
tug-boats march away with every floating thing to which they are
hitched--even dragging huge Atlantic steamships at their sides--because
they reach deep down into the water, where their big screws, driven by
very powerful engines, obtain a mighty hold. Because our tug-boats are
so small, and yet so strong, they are able to move swiftly when they
have no burdens to carry. In the boatman's dream that I spoke of they
would seem like those water-spiders that many of us have seen darting
hither and thither on the top of placid pools. But there is one reason
why they are not at all alike--that is, that the water-spiders are as
silent as death, while the tug-boats are the most noisy, saucy,
boisterous of make-believe animals--always gasping, and snorting, and
whistling, and thrashing about as very little people are often apt to
do.

[Illustration: FLOATING GRAIN ELEVATOR.]

The "floats" that carry passengers around New York so that they can go
to Boston from Philadelphia or Chicago without changing cars (and even
without getting out of bed on the sleeping cars), are not floats at all.
They are very powerful and large steamboats, with decks covered with
iron plates, with car tracks on those decks, and with arrangements for
locking the car wheels fast to the tracks, so that no matter how
boisterous the water may be on stormy days, the cars cannot break loose
and roll overboard. We have several queer sorts of boats and other
floating objects that look like floating houses. Among them are what we
call our floating baths, and our floating docks, and our cattle and ice
barges. But there is one kind of floating building that looks like a
tower or a steeple riding the waters and steering itself around. That
strange thing--and we employ many such--is a floating grain-elevator. It
is a tall four-sided tower built upon a squat snub-nosed boat. It has a
great proboscis, that it sticks down into canal-boats full of grain,
which it sucks or dips out so that it can load the grain into the holds
of ships that are to carry it to Europe. Our floating baths are square
one-story houses, hollow in the