We had an immense snowstorm yesterday—snow the entire day & all night. We were 111⁄2 hours making a 7-hour trip.
To-day we are likely to be all day going 3 hours. We’ve got 3 cars & 3 engines. Alongside us, out here in the snowy plains is a Pacific RR train standing still, whose  engines cannot budge it a peg.

“He [Twain] informed Livy on the seventeenth that his companion was the 'pitifulest human louse' he had ever known” (pg 62 Cardwell)