Begun as pioneer works, they undergo, as traffic progresses, many improvements. Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one, filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This trestle bridge plan of expediting the completion, and cheapening the construction, of new railways, wants more study, at home. Whenever there are gorges and valleys to pass in a timbered country, the facility they give of getting "through" is enormous. The Canadian Pacific would not be open now, but for this facility. All these lines across the Continent have very similar features. They each have prairies to pass, with long straight lines and horizons which seem ever vanishing and never reached; mountain ranges of vast altitudes to cross, alkaline lands, hitherto uncultivable, hot sulphur springs, prairie-dogs, gophyrs, and other animals not usually seen. The buffalo has retired from the neighbourhood of these iron-roads and of the "fire-wagons," as the Indians call the locomotives. Here and there on all the prairies on all the lines, heaps of whitened bones, of buffalo, elk, and stag, are piled up at stations, to be taken away for agricultural purposes. The railways resemble each other in their ambitious extensions. The Canadian Pacific Railway, from Quebec to Port Moody, is above 3,000 miles in length, but the total mileage of the Company is already 4,600 miles, and no one knows where it is to stop, while Messrs. Baring and Glyn will, and can, raise money from English people; the Union Pacific possesses 4,500 miles in the United States; the Southern Pacific nearly 5,000; and the newest of the three, the Northern Pacific, has about 3,000 miles, and is "marching on" to a junction with Grand Trunk extensions at the southern end of Lake Superior, in order to complete a second Atlantic and Pacific route, through favoured Canada. Each of these great lines has found the necessity of supplementing the through, with as much local traffic, as it can command. Some of this is new, such as the coal traffic from Sir Alexander Galt's mines, situated on a branch line of 110 miles, running out of the Canadian Pacific at Dunmore, and the mineral traffic in the territory of Wyoming on the Union Pacific. But, again, some of it is the result of competition. Let us hope that the development of both Canada and the United States may quickly give trade enough for all. It seems to me, however, that the Ocean to Ocean traffic, alone, cannot, at present at least, find a good return for so many railways.