happened to many as young as you, and they were glad that their lives
were left them, after everything else was gone.

Let us put the thought of war out of our minds, and go on to see what
took place under the blessed reign of peace. The first thing of which I
shall tell you was one of the most wonderful of all. You know how the
telegraph wires spread over the country until they were many thousands
of miles in length. In the next chapter you may read how the electric
telegraph was invented. In the year after the war ended a still greater
thing was done. A telegraph cable was laid under the ocean from Europe
to America. This had been done before, but it had proved a failure. The
new cable was a success, and since then a man in London has been able to
talk with a man in New York as if he were not a hundred yards away. Of
course, I do not mean with his voice, but with the click of the
telegraph instrument.

The year after that a great addition was made to the United States.
There was a large region in the north, known as Russian America, which
Russia offered to sell to this country for seven million dollars. Many
people talked about this as some of their forefathers had talked about
the purchase of Louisiana by President Jefferson. They said that it was
a land of ice and snow which Russia wanted to get rid of, and that it
would be of no use to anybody. But it was bought for all that, and it
has proven a very good bargain.

This country we now call Alaska. We get there all the sealskins from
which the rich and warm cloaks of the ladies are made. And most of the
canned salmon, which some of you think very good food, come from Alaska.
That country is rich in furs and fish and timber; and that is not all,
for it is rich in gold. Millions of dollars worth of gold are obtained
there every year. It has been something like California, whose gold was
not found till Americans got there to dig.

These are not the only things that took place in the years after the
war. Railroads were being built in all directions. East and west, north
and south, they went, and travel became easier than it had been before.
The greatest thing done in this way was the building of a railroad
across the mountains and the plains to San Francisco, on the far Pacific
coast, three thousand miles away from the Atlantic shores. Before that
time men who wanted to go to California had to drag along over thousands
of miles in slow wagon trains and spend weeks