here. Most people know that a swarm of locusts can stop a train, for
the bodies of these pests are full of grease, and after the
engine-wheels have crushed countless thousands of locusts, the wheels
become so coated with oil that they merely revolve, and refuse to grip
the rails. Let the driver open his sand-box never so widely, the
wheels cannot bite, and so the train comes to a standstill. Oddly
enough, a bird, too, causes a great deal of trouble. The "oven-bird"
makes a large domed nest of clay, the size of a cocoa-nut. In that
treeless land the oven-birds look on telegraph-posts as specially
provided by a benign Providence to afford them eligible nesting-sites,
and from some perversity of instinct, or perhaps attracted by the
gleam of the white earthenware, they invariably select one of the
porcelain insulators as the site of their future home, and proceed to
coat it laboriously with clay, thus effectually destroying the
insulation. Now the working of a single-line is entirely dependent on
the telegraph, and the oven-birds, with their misplaced zeal, were
continually interrupting telegraphic communication, so on the Great
Southern Railway of Buenos Ayres every single telegraph-post was
surmounted with a wooden box, mutely proclaiming itself the most
desirable building-site that heart of bird could wish for, and
silently offering whatever equivalents to a gravel soil and a southern
aspect could suggest themselves to the avian intelligence. In spite of
this these misguided fowls retained their affection for the
insulators, and the Great Southern had during the nesting season to
employ a gang of men to tear the nests down.

Unlike the majority of railways, both in North and South America,
which have adopted the 4 ft. 8-1/2 ins. gauge, the standard gauge of
the Argentine Republic is the Irish one of 5 ft. 3 ins., and the
reason of this is rather singular. In 1855, during the Crimean War, a