Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/303

Charles Dickens] into play. There are three or four men at the club, whom you know, and who are tolerably certain of seats, and who, if once they get the opportunity of making their voices heard in Parliament, will show the world of what stuff real Englishmen consist. Who do you think is helping us immensely? Shimmer, he of Bliffkins's! He has got an engagement on the Comet—a new journal which has just started in our interest, and he is writing admirably. A good deal of Lemprière's dictionary, and Bohn's quotations, and Solomon's proverbs, mixed up with a dashing incisive style and sound Saxon English, has proved immensely telling. People are buying the Comet everywhere, and Shimmer's salary has been twice raised, and he has been applied to for his photograph. He does not come much to Bliffkins's now, greatly to old Wickwar's relief. The old gentleman has expressed his opinion that since Robsperry (he is supposed to have meant Robespierre) there has been no such sanguinary democrat as Shimmer. When will you come back to us, Walter? I look at the place where I used to see you sitting, before I ever spoke to you; I sit and stare at it now until I feel my eyes D—d old fool!

"Good-bye, boy. Let me hear from you again soon. You know what you promised, if ever you wanted money, or anything. "J. B.

"Opened again, to say Shimmer has been here, inquiring after you. Comet people want a correspondent at Berlin—special and important. S. thinks you'll do. Will you go? "J. B."

The company had long since departed from Westhope; the family had long since retired to rest; dim lights glimmered here and there in the windows; but Walter Joyce remained sitting on the side of his bed, with Jack Byrne's open letter in his hand. When he wrote it, the old man little thought what a field of painful speculation he had laid open for its recipient.

is only at this late day, that people are beginning to comprehend and appreciate what the Pacific Railroad really is. The enterprise, aside from its sentimental aspects, is one of such importance to civilisation in general, and to the commerce of the whole world in particular, that a familiarity with its leading features cannot fail to interest as well as instruct a reading and commercial public like that of England. Considering both the distance which that railroad is to traverse, and the difficulties of nature with which it has to contend, it is no exaggeration to pronounce it the greatest enterprise which has been set on foot, since the railway locomotive was invented. Rumours have come faintly to us of the immense height, the awful sublimity, the rugged and apparently inaccessible crags and cliffs, of the Rocky Mountains; but now that the every-day traveller is brought by steam to their base, the descriptions become more distinct and awe-inspiring, and the natural grandeur of the American Far West dawns clearly upon us. It is the task of the Pacific Railroad, after toiling for thousands of miles, to reach the lowest spurs of the Rocky Mountains, to penetrate their gigantic passes, to subdue the rugged obstacles which those vast mountain solitudes present to the ingenuity of civilisation, and to emerge into the Golden Land beyond.

The magnitude of the undertaking, the success of which is now as certain as anything human can be, may be in some degree estimated by its extent. From Omaha, the extreme eastern terminus of the road, to Sacramento, California, the western terminus, the distance is one thousand seven hundred and twenty miles. But if you make the starting point at New York—for the great railway line will virtually be from New York to Sacramento—the distance between the Atlantic and the Pacific termini will be somewhat over three thousand five hundred miles. How many times this multiplies the distance between Land's End and John O'Groat's, or how many times it multiplies the distance between Paris and St. Petersburg, the English reader may easily work out. Of this three thousand and odd miles to be traversed between New York and Sacramento, eighteen hundred were already completed—namely, as far as Omaha, on the Missouri River—before the Pacific Railway was begun. Regular travel and traffic were already going on, half across the continent. Omaha is one of those places which grow from obscurity to fame, over night. Even after the Pacific Railroad project had been mooted for years, no one had ever heard of Omaha. It is situated on the Missouri River, a few miles north of the junction of the Missouri with the Platte. Just across the former stream, on a bold eminence, stands a settlement of very old date, called Council Bluffs. Everybody thought that Council Bluffs would be the grand junction of the eastern lines with the Pacific—the link to connect California with her distant sister States. The fickleness of human, especially of land speculating, fortune, however, decreed that the people of Council Bluffs should witness, across the river, the securing of the prize by the mushroom settlement of Omaha. It was decided to make that place the terminus of the great thoroughfare to the Pacific; accordingly Omaha became famous, and grew wonderfully, and was besieged by the great speculators of the republic. After a long discussion as to the practicability of carrying a railway through