"Underground Railway" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Underground Railway official last week, "must remember that the seats and straps are put there for the use of the passengers." We know all about straps, but we have often wondered what it feels like to use one of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... well worth while, and I took my regulation "Webley"—a relic of my old Volunteer captaincy. Then, by way of the underground railway, I gained the neighbourhood of Mile End, and interested myself about its back streets till the time approached to look for ...
— The Red Triangle - Being Some Further Chronicles of Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... The Underground Railway may, like Nature, be careless of the individual, but it is extremely careful of the typewriter, and insists on making a special charge for this instrument, officially regarded as a bicycle. But as Sir ERIC GEDDES announced that this extortion, "though legal," was in his opinion "neither ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... hide by day and to travel by night. When all other signs failed they kept their eyes fixed on the North Star, whose light "seemed the enduring witness of the divine interest in their deliverance." By the system known as the "underground railway," the fugitive was passed from one friendly house to another. A code of signals was used by those engaged in the work of mercy—pass words, peculiar knocks and raps, a call like that of the owl. Negroes in transit were described as "fleeces of wool," and "volumes of the irrepressible ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... well fed and clothed, given the rudiments of spiritual and educational training, necessary medical attention in sickness; and it was not unusual for some slave owners to give a slave his or her freedom as a reward for faithful or unusual services. If there was any of the so-called "Underground Railway" method used to get slaves out of the state, as was the case in many counties, there are no current stories or legends relative to such to be heard in the county today. It is thought that the slaves of Casey County were so well cared for ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... the underground railway that ran thousands of farmers out of occupied territory. Manpower was what finally broke Invader, improbable as it seems. Epidemics, desertions, over-extended lines, thinned that overwhelming combat strength; and every farmer spirited out of their hands ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... and no poor helpless creature of her race was ever turned from her door. Indeed, all through the war, and through the cruel reign of the fugitive slave law, her house was one of the depots of the "Underground Railway," as that secret and unseen mode of conveying the hunted fugitives was called, and when the war was over she established a hospital, which for many years, indeed till she was too ill herself to take charge of it, has been the refuge ...
— Harriet, The Moses of Her People • Sarah H. Bradford
... that if Holymead had gone out to see Sir Horace Fewbanks at Riversbrook and had desired to keep his visit a secret he would not have taken a cab at Hyde Park Corner to Hampstead, but would have travelled by underground railway or omnibus. In all probability the Tube had been used because of its speed being more in harmony with the feelings of a man impatient to get done with a subject so important that Sir Horace had been recalled from Scotland to deal with it. He would leave the ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... asked, but she would not listen to him. It was Maitre Gardon who made him understand the project. There was what in later times has been termed an underground railway amid the persecuted Calvinists, and M. Gardon knew his ground well enough to have little doubt of being able to conduct the lady safely to some town on the coast, whence she might reach her friends in England. The plan highly satisfied Martin. It relieved him and his neighbours from the necessity ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... house was a station on the Underground Railway, and Russell Conwell remembers, when a lad, seeing the escaping slaves that his father had driven across country and temporarily hidden. "Those were heroic days," he says, quietly. "And once in a while my father let me go with him. They were wonderful night drives—the ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... the burning faith that is in you. But how about your friends and acquaintances? How many of them can cope with you in discussion? How many of them show even a desire to cope with you? Travel, I beg you, on the Underground Railway, or in a Tube. Such places are supposed to engender in their passengers a taste for political controversy. Yet how very elementary are such arguments as you will hear there! It is obvious that these gentlemen know and care very little about 'burning questions.' What they do know ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... wants to say, or if he wishes to express himself in the classic and perfect manner. But if it is his fate merely to be obliged to say something, in the course of his profession, or if he is bid to discourse for the pleasure of readers in the Underground Railway, I fear he will often have to forget Mr. Pater. It may not be literature, the writing of causeries, of Roundabout Papers, of rambling articles "on a broomstick," and yet again, it may be literature! "Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden"—Mr. Pater charges ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... feeling abashed at his own poverty, was driven in this gorgeous equipage to the Underground Railway station, where he took the train for ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... the lands which are its best commentary, Carleton concluded that the crossing of the Red Sea by the fugitive slaves from Egypt, over an "underground railway made by the order of God himself," "instead of being in the domain of the miraculous, is under natural law." At Suez, one of the half-way houses of the world, he was amused at the jollity of the Mohammedans, who had just broken their long lenten fast from tobacco ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... 97-year-old ex-slave whose early life was spent helping slaves to freedom across the Ohio River, while he, himself, remained in bondage. As he puts it, he guesses he could be called a 'conductor' on the underground railway, "only we didn't call it that then. I don't know as we called it anything—we just knew there was a lot of slaves always a-wantin' to get free, and I ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... way north, it did not enter his mind as possible. Slaves did indeed at times succeed in traveling through the Northern States and making their way to Canada, but this was only possible by means of the organization known as the underground railway, an association consisting of a number of good people who devoted themselves to the purpose, giving shelter to fugitive slaves during the day, and then passing them on to the next refuge during the night. For in the Northern States as well as the Southern any negro unprovided ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... class-room exercises in any other school of Christendom whatever—namely, the Sabbath. It is interesting to reflect what would be the comment on such a procedure in London, for example, where the underground railway trains even must stop running during the hours of morning service. But Jena is not London, and, as Professor Haeckel says, "In Jena one is free. It pleases us to have our Sabbath service ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... end of the day our weary one is so fearfully tired, although she has been sitting all day, that she feels as though her limbs would never carry her home. Come what may, she must ride. She puts herself into the first Underground Railway carriage that will take her to her destination, and, exchanging the carbonic acid gas of the workroom for the sulphurous gas of the underground tunnels, she arrives home spent and utterly tired out, longing to get ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... lunch, and then they all went up to Bronx Park, traveling in the subway, or the underground railway, which seems strange to so many visitors to New York. But the Bobbsey twins had traveled that way before, so they did ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... clock his change of dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his paper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh of his face then fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip a whole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and old Huxtable's head will hold them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print, what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly, quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels, till the whole hall, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... his fiery chum outside, and they hurried along, at the scout pace, running and walking alternately, toward the West Kensington station of the Underground Railway. They were in their khaki scout uniforms, and several people turned to smile admiringly at them. The newspapers had already announced that the Boy Scouts had turned out unanimously to do whatever service they could, and it was a time when women — ...
— The Boy Scout Aviators • George Durston
... was going on there was the 'underground railway' in Ohio. But after the surrender some of the people in Ohio were not so good to the colored people. The old folks told me they were stoned when they came across the river to Ohio after the surrender and that the colored people were ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... Budapest is a disappointment. One expects to feel the first breath of the East, and one gets a modern, a Western, almost an American town, with an electric underground railway and a telephonic newspaper which reads itself out all day long to whosoever will clap the cups to his ears—the old town crier in terms of modern science. But it rounds off the day, poetically enough, with music, so that when I sought to hear the latest news, I was treated to ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... simple giant of a Russian here who was badly sprung at the knees. He had been forced to work during the winter in an underground railway station near Berlin. He had had no shoes and had stood in the water for weeks, digging. He was very badly ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... retain the best routine of antiquity very much more than any localities or machines used by any privileged class. Things are not altered so quickly or completely by common people as they are by fashionable people. Ruskin could have found more memories of the Middle Ages in the Underground Railway than in the grand hotels outside the stations. The great palaces of pleasure which the rich build in London all have brazen and vulgar names. Their names are either snobbish, like the Hotel Cecil, or (worse still) cosmopolitan like the Hotel Metropole. But when I go in a third-class carriage ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... and considered it far finer than any Sicilian procession—more poetical in conception, he said, and carried out with greater magnificence. He had been to Brighton from Saturday to Monday and burst into tears when he saw the sea again. It is difficult to travel on the Underground Railway without losing oneself, but Peppino can do it. He got lost once, but that was in some street near Covent Garden, soon after his arrival, and before he had ventured alone in the Underground; he asked his way of a policeman who spoke Italian and told ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Johnson in 1805, the house has passed through many hands, all descendants of the builder, however. During the Civil War it became a station of the "underground railway" for conducting fugitive slaves to Canada, and Mrs. Josiah Reeve, a great-great-granddaughter of the builder, used to tell how, when a child, she often wondered why so many colored people lived in the attic, staying only a day or so, ...
— The Colonial Architecture of Philadelphia • Frank Cousins
... needful to be done which made it impossible to go into the city to take up and set down Mrs. Mark Egremont; and to leave her to make her way home would be no kindness. So Nuttie only accomplished a visit once before going out of town, and that was by her own exertions—by underground railway and cab. Then she found all going prosperously; the blacks not half so obnoxious as had been expected (of course not, thought Nuttie, in the middle of the summer); the look-out over the yard very amusing to Billy-boy; and the large old-fashioned pannelled rooms, ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to his house, and gave me something to eat, and enquired where I came from and where I belonged; I hesitated about telling my true situation, but after considerable conversation with him, I ventured to confide in him, and when I had given him, all the particulars, he took me to the underground Railway office and introduced me to the officials, who having heard my story determined to send me to Canada, forty dollars being raised to find me clothes, and pay my fare to Toronto, but I was only taken to Utica, in the State of ...
— Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, a Runaway Slave, from Kentucky • Jacob D. Green
... their visit to the Tower, to Westminster Abbey, the Monument, Madame Tussauds; how they mistook the waxwork policeman for a real member of the force; how they shuddered in the Chamber of Horrors; how they travelled on the new Underground Railway; and saw the wonders of the Crystal Palace, especially on fireworks night. They told us of their visit to the Great Eastern, what a gigantic ship it was, what a marvel, and described its every feature. They talked of General Tom Thumb, of Blondin, of Pepper's Ghost, of the Christy Minstrels. ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... a mere nothing. (Takes out a cigar.) Got a light about you? Thanks. Perhaps you don't recollect twenty-seven years ago this very day, travelling from Edgware Road to Baker Street, by the Underground Railway? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... not distinguished as a scholar; he was but an orthodox minister of ability and originality, and with a vivacious personal history. Of him I knew something. From his own lips came thrilling stories of his connection with the underground railway of slavery days; how he sent the sharpest carving-knife in the house, concealed in a basket of food, to a hidden fugitive slave who had vowed never to be taken alive, and whose master had come North in search of him. It was a fine thing, that throbbing humanity, which could in those days ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell |
