"Even you and I will see the day that steamboats will come up that little
Turkey river to within twenty miles of this land of ours--and in high
water they'll come right to it! And this is not all, Nancy--it isn't
even half! There's a bigger wonder--the railroad! These worms here have
never even heard of it--and when they do they'll not believe in it.
But it's another fact. Coaches that fly over the ground twenty miles an
hour--heavens and earth, think of that, Nancy! Twenty miles an hour.
It makes a main's brain whirl. Some day, when you and I are in our
graves, there'll be a railroad stretching hundreds of miles--all the way
down from the cities of the Northern States to New Orleans--and its got
to run within thirty miles of this land--may be even touch a corner of
it. Well; do you know, they've quit burning wood in some places in the
Eastern States? And what do you suppose they burn? Coal!" [He bent over
and whispered again:] "There's world--worlds of it on this land! You
know that black stuff that crops out of the bank of the branch?--well,
that's it. You've taken it for rocks; so has every body here; and
they've built little dams and such things with it.
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