will not be much coal left by the time he gets through with the job;
while on the other hand, should I see at regular intervals a cloud of
smoke going up, and lasting for a few moments, and for the next few
moments see nothing, then I conclude that the engineer of that engine
knows his business, and that he is not working hard; he has plenty of
steam all the time, and has coal left when he is through. So let us go
and see what makes this difference and learn a valuable lesson. We will
first go to the engine that is making such a smoke, and we will find
that the engineer has a big coal shovel just small enough to allow it to
enter the fire door. You will see the engineer throw in about two, or
perhaps three shovels of coal and as a matter of course, we will see a
volume of black smoke issuing from the stack; the engineer stands
leaning on his shovel watching the steam gauge, and he finds that the
steam don't run up very fast, and about the time the coal gets hot
enough to consume the smoke, we will see him drop his shovel, pick up a
poker, throw open the fire door and commence a vigorous punching and
digging at the fire. This starts the black smoke again, and about this
time we will see him down on his knees with his poker, punching at the
underside of the grate bars, about the time he is through with this
operation the smoke is coming out less dense, and he thinks it time to
throw in more coal, and he does it. Now this is kept up all day, and
you must not read this and say it is overdrawn, for it is not, and you
can see it every day, and the engineer that fires in this way, works
hard, burns a great amount of coal, and is afraid all the time that the
steam will run down on him.

Before leaving him let us take a look at his firebox, and we will see
that it is full of coal, at least up to the level of the door. We will
also see quite a pile of ashes under the ash pan. You can better
understand the disadvantage of this way of firing after we visit the