e railroad-building
yourself, down there in Tennessee--I know, for I was there. And I've
always taken an interest in track-laying ever since."

"So have I," said the General; "that's what brought me out to-day."

"Oh, tell us about it," said Josie, evidently pleased at the change of
subject; "tell us about it, please."

"No, no!" he protested, "you may read it better in the histories,
written by young fellows who know more about it than we who were there.
You'll find, when you read it, that it was something like this: Grant's
host was over around Chattanooga, starving for want of means for
carrying in provisions. We were marching eastward to join him, when a
message came telling us to stop at Decatur and rebuild the railroad to
Nashville. So, without a thought that there was such a thing as an
impossibility, we stopped--we seven or eight thousand common Americans,
volunteer soldiers, picked at random from the legions of heroes who
saved liberty to the world--and without an engineering corps, without
tools or implements, with nothing except what any like number of our
soldiers had, we stopped and built the road. That is all. The rails had
been heated, and wound about trees and stumps. The cross-ties were
burned to heat the rails. The cars had been destroyed by fire, and their
warped ironwork thrown into ditches. The engines lay in scrap-heaps at
the bottoms of ravines and rivers. The bridges were gone. Out of the
chaos to which the structure had been resolved, there was nothing left
but the road-bed.

"When I think of what we did, I know that with liberty and intelligence
men with their naked hands could, in short space, re-create the
destroyed wealth of the world. We made tools of the scraps of iron and
steel we found along the line. We felled trees. We impressed little
sawmills and sawed the logs into timbers for bridges and cars. Out of
the battle-scarred and march-worn ranks came creative and constructive
genius in such profusion as to astound us, who thought we knew them so
well. Those blue-coated fellows, enlisted and serving as food for
powder, and used to destruction, rejoiced in once more feeling the
thrill there is in making things."

"Out of the ranks came millers, and ground the grain the foragers
brought in; came woodmen, and cut the trees; came sawyers, and sawed the
lumber. We asked for blacksmiths; and they stepped from the ranks, and
made their own tools and the tools of the machinists. We called fo