if I owned it I'd get its obituary ready,
now, and notify the mourners. Polly, mark my words--in three years from
this, Hawkeye'll be a howling wilderness. You'll see. And just look at
that river--noblest stream that meanders over the thirsty earth!
--calmest, gentlest artery that refreshes her weary bosom! Railroad
goes all over it and all through it--wades right along on stilts.
Seventeen bridges in three miles and a half--forty-nine bridges from
Hark-from-the-Tomb to Stone's Landing altogether--forty nine bridges, and
culverts enough to culvert creation itself! Hadn't skeins of thread
enough to represent them all--but you get an idea--perfect trestle-work
of bridges for seventy two miles: Jeff Thompson and I fixed all that, you
know; he's to get the contracts and I'm to put them through on the
divide. Just oceans of money in those bridges. It's the only part of
the railroad I'm interested in,--down along the line--and it's all I
want, too. It's enough, I should judge. Now here we are at Napoleon.
Good enough country plenty good enough--all it wants is population.
That's all right--that will come. And it's no bad country now for
calmness and solitude, I can tell you--though there's no money in that,
of course. No money, but a man wants rest, a man wants peace--a man
don't want to rip and tear around all the time. And here we go, now,
just as straight as a string for Hallelujah--it's a beautiful angle
--handsome up grade all the way --and then away you go to Corruptionville,
the gaudiest country for early carrots and cauliflowers that ever--good
missionary field, too. There ain't such another missionary field outside
the jungles of Central Africa. And patriotic?--why they named it after
Congress itself. Oh, I warn you, my dear, there's a good time coming,
and it'll be right along before you know what you're about, too. That
railroad's fetching it. You see what it is as far as I've got, and if I
had enough bottles and soap and boot-jacks and such things to carry it
along to where it joins onto the Union Pacific, fourteen hundred miles
from here, I should exhibit to you in that little internal improvement a
spectacle of inconceivable sublimity. So, don't you see? We've got the
rail road to fall back on; and in the meantime, what are we worrying
about that $200,000 appropriation for? That's all right. I'd be willing
to bet anything that the very next letter that comes from Harry will--"

The eldest boy e