I will never forget the horrors of that five days passage, and to add to our trouble, we experienced one of those terrible storms they called “northers” in that latitude, during which we very nearly foundered. You can imagine a small paddle-wheel river-steamboat of 600 tons loaded down with nearly 2,000 men, 16 pieces of brass cannon, and thousands of Mexican lances, besides the rotten pork, Rio coffee, and the hardest kind of tack. The cannon and lances were captured by Colonel Donophan’s regiment at the Battles of Sacramento and San Jacinto, and comprised all the artillery the Mexicans had at these two fights. I am confident if this war occurred at the present day, we would have had a harder task to perform, as Mexico is possessed now of a well-disciplined army, splendidly officered and of very different materials, and trust we will always live in peace and friendly intercourse with our Mexican brothers, as should become all near-by neighbours and friends. Sherman and others, returning from the shores of our Western sea, joined in another march, from Atlanta, to our Eastern sea, and but for these, who can tell what would have been the result of our experiment of self-government, or where the boundary lines of the States of freedom would be drawn to-day. Milton says: “Peace hath her victories No less renowned than war,” and the men of peace who remained fought battles in the material world, with equal dangers requiring equal courage, and with results as supremely grand. The difficulties, dangers, and cost incident to the construction of the Central Pacific Railway were such as scarcely to be comprehended by men of to-day; its obstacles were simply appalling. The art of railway construction at that time was so far removed from its present advanced state that engineers looked upon the project with amazement, and capitalists with derision, its conception was so bold, so grand, so stupendous, so startling, as to fill the incredulous even with admiration. Bonaparte’s crossing of the Alps with his army and artillery is dwarfed into tameness when compared with the achievement which made this the highway of nations and the “rapid transit” of the world’s commerce. In the autumn of 1849, the very month that California was organised as a territory, a Pacific Railroad Convention was held. On May 1, 1852, the Legislature of California passed “an Act granting the right of way to the United States for a railroad to connect the navigable waters of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the purposes of national safety in the event of war, and to promote the highest interests of the Republic, pronounced one of the greatest necessities of the age.” A Senator, upon the floor of Congress, said: “I look upon the building of the railroad from the waters of the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean, at the time particularly in which it was built during the war, as perhaps the greatest achievement of