After peace was restored in 1865, came a great period of railroad building. During ten years the number of miles of railroad more than doubled, nearly four thousand miles being built each year. This was the period when the continuous lines, which had already reached the Missouri River, were continued across the continent. After five years of labor the Union Pacific Railroad, starting at Omaha, Nebraska, met at Ogden, Utah, the Central Pacific, which had been built from Sacramento, California. May 10th, 1869, the last spike was driven and the Pacific coast was bound to the Atlantic by bands of steel. Since the completion of the Union and Central Pacific railroads, four other through lines have been constructed across the Rocky Mountains, within the territory of the United States, and one in Canada. It is now possible to go from ocean to ocean in less than five days, and to have such a choice of routes that neither the cold of winter nor the heat of summer need be troublesome. At last the limit of rapid traveling seems to have been reached. Walking and horseback riding are indulged in only for pleasure and health; stagecoaches are used only for short lines where the railroad has not yet come; but all the long-distance traveling is now done behind the locomotive. Journeys of weeks have become trips of a few days, days have been lessened to hours, and the country has become knit together by rapid transit. Is there a chance for further improvement? CHAPTER VII. MODERN WATER TRAVEL. James Greenleaf arrived in Duluth, one bright June day, four hundred and five years after the discovery of America. For nearly forty years he had been a missionary among the Indians of the British Northwest, but he had finally been persuaded to take a well-earned rest. Leaving his little settlement of red men, and taking a canoe, he had paddled up stream, carried his canoe over a portage, and paddled down a river until he reached Lake Superior, where a small sailboat had taken him to the flourishing city at the western end of the lake. At the hotel he found, as he expected, his nephew, Henry Towne. Mr. Towne was a commercial traveler, always "on the road," as he would say, for a large furniture establishment in New York. In a letter to his uncle he had stated that business would call him to Minnesota at just that time, and that he would make the journey with his uncle from Duluth to New York. The next day the two men started. The nephew had made all the necessary arrangements, having purchased tickets and engaged staterooms on the line of steamboats that connect Duluth with Buffalo. The first sight of the steamboat caused Mr. Greenleaf to exclaim at its size. "It is not much like the steamboat that I took on the Hudson in the spring of 1856," he said. "I imagine, however, that I shall see greater differences than this, the further I go." As the two men made a tour through the steamboat, the older gave expression to his thoughts in many ways.