Thus began the history of a gigantic enterprise which has grown till it is a comfort, a convenience, a luxury, and yet a necessity. It has built up and beautified the desert. It has crept beneath the broad river, scaled the snowy mountain, and hung by iron arms from the canon and the precipice, carrying the young to new lands and reuniting those long separated. It has taken the hopeless to lands of new hope. It has evaded the solitude of the wilderness, spiked down valuable land-grants, killed cheap cattle and then paid a high price for them, whooped through valleys, snorted over lofty peaks, crept through long, dark tunnels, turning the bright glare of day suddenly upon those who thought the tunnel was two miles long, roared through the night and glittered through the day, bringing alike the groom to his beautiful bride and the weeping prodigal to the moss-grown grave of his mother. You are indeed a heartless, soulless corporation, and yet you are very essential in our business. BILL NYE'S LETTER. HOW OLD BRINDLE MET HER DEATH WITH A TRAIN. A QUAINT EPISTLE, IN WHICH THE HUMORIST GIVES HIS EXPERIENCE WITH RAILROAD OFFICIALS--HOW HE SECURED PAY FOR A COW. DEAR HENRY: Your letter stating that you had just succeeded in running your face for a new curriculum is at hand and contents noted, as the feller said when I wrote to him two years ago and told him that his cussed railroad had mashed old Brin. You remember that just as you entered on what you called your junior year, old Brin remained out all night, and your mother and me took our coffee milkless in the morning. Well, I went down to the pound to see if she had registered there, but she hadn't been stopping there, the night clerk said. He maintained, however, that "number two-aught-eight"--as he called it--had come in half an hour late with a cow's head on the pilot and brindle hair on the runnin' gears of the tender. So I went over to the station and found Brin's head there, whereupon I went down the track in search of her, though I feared it would be futile, as you once said about administering a half sole to your summer pantaloons. Well, I was right about it, Henry. If I'd been in the futile business for years I couldn't have been more so than I was on this occasion. The old cow was dead and so identified with the right of way, that her own mother would not have known her.