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.

THE PACIFIC RAILROAD.

IT 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