it up to the table, but some day we will, Then we will have a station
there on the flat, and another station on the floor, with shunts and
sidings to each.

The peculiar joy of the mountain railway is that, if it is properly
made, a loaded car--not a toy engine; it is too rough a game for
delicate, respectable engines--will career from top to bottom of the
system, and go this way and that as your cunningly-arranged switches
determine; and afterwards--and this is a wonderful and distinctive
discovery--you can send it back by 'lectric.

What is a 'lectric? You may well ask. 'Lectrics were invented almost by
accident, by one of us, to whom also the name is due. It came out of an
accident to a toy engine; a toy engine that seemed done for and that was
yet full of life.

You know, perhaps, what a toy engine is like. It has the general
appearance of a railway engine; funnels, buffers, cab, and so forth. All
these are very elegant things, no doubt; but they do not make for
lightness, they do not facilitate hill-climbing. Now, sometimes an
engine gets its clockwork out of order, and then it is over and done
for; but sometimes it is merely the outer semblance that is injured--
the funnel bent, the body twisted. You remove the things and, behold !
you have bare clockwork on wheels, an apparatus of almost malignant
energy, soul without body, a kind of metallic rage. This it was that our
junior member instantly knew for a 'lectric, and loved from the moment
of its stripping.

(I have, by the by, known a very serviceable little road 'lectric made
out of a clockwork mouse.)