"I hope, General," said he, "that our little movement won't develop into a dervish-dance. Anyhow, you will join in our congratulations upon the completion of the railroad. You know you once did some 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."