ral sometimes laid ten miles of rails in one day.

Ogden was made the meeting-point, though at Promontory, fifty miles
west of Ogden, the last spike was driven. A thousand people met at
that place in May, '69, to see the short space of track closed and the
road finished. A Central train and locomotive from the Pacific came
steaming up, and an engine and cars from the Atlantic pulled in on
the other side. Both engines whistled till the snow-capped mountains
echoed. The last tie was of polished California laurel wood, with
a silver plate on which the names of the two companies and their
officers were engraved. It was put under the last two rails, and all
was fastened together with the last spike. This spike, made of solid
gold, Governor Stanford hammered into place with a silver hammer. East
and west the news was flashed over the long telegraph line, that the
overland railroad had been finished and that two oceans were joined by
iron rails.

Now, while flying along in the cars so fast that the trip from Chicago
to San Francisco takes but three days, it is hard to believe that
little more than thirty years ago travellers in the slow-moving
"prairie-schooner" took over five months to cover this same distance.

STORY OF THE WHEAT FIELDS

The Spanish Padres, as the Mission priests were called, taught the
Indians to plough and seed with wheat the lands belonging to the
church or Mission. They used a simple wooden plough, which oxen
pulled. When the warm brown earth was turned up, the Indians broke the
clods by dragging great tree branches over them. After the fall rains
they scattered tiny wheat kernels and covered them snugly for their
nap in the dark ground.

More rain fell, and soon the soaked seeds waked, and started in
slender green shoots to find the sunshine, and day by day the stalks
grew stronger and the fields greener. Higher and ever higher sprang
the wheat, till summer winds set the tall grain waving in a sea
of green billows. Have you ever watched the wind blow across a
wheat-field? Over and over the long rollers bend the tops of the
grain, that rise as the breeze goes on and bend low again at the next
breath of wind.

When the hot sun had ripened the grain, and all round the
white-walled, red-roofed Mission the fields stretched golden and ready
for harvest, the Indians cut the wheat, and scattering the bundles
over a spot of hard ground, drove oxen round and round on the sheaves
till the wheat was