that the hurdling on it, if placed in one straight, continuous line,
would reach full ten miles!

A portable steam engine, of twelve-horse power, looking like a
common railway locomotive strayed from its track and taken up and
housed in a farmer's waggon-shed, performs prodigies of activity and
labor. Indeed, search the three realms through and through, and you
would hardly find one on its own legs doing such remarkable
varieties of work. Briareus, with all his fabled faculties, never
had such numerous and supple fingers as this creature of human
invention. When set a-going, they are clattering and whisking and
frisking everywhere, on the barn-floor, on the hay-loft, in the
granary, under the eaves, down cellar, and all this at the same
time. It is doubtful if any stationary engine in a machine shop
ever performed more diversified operations at once; thus proving
most conclusively how a farmer may work motive power which it was
once thought preposterous in him to think of using. It threshes
wheat and other kinds of grain at the rate of from 400 to 500
bushels a day; it conveys the straw up to a platform across what we
call the "_great beams_," where it is cut into chaff and dropped
into a great bay, at the trifling expense of sixpence, or twelve
cents, per quantity grown on an acre! While it is doing this in one
direction, it is turning machinery in another that cleans and weighs
the grain off into sacks ready for the market. Open the doors right
and left and you find it at work like reason, breaking oil-cake,
grinding corn for the fat stock, turning the grindstone, pitching,
pounding, paring, rubbing, grabbing, and twisting, threshing,
wrestling, chopping, flopping, and hopping, after the manner of "The
Waters of Lodore."