People laughed at railroads in these early days and had about as much faith in them as we now have in flying machines. A few years ago men would have had the same sport about wireless telegraphy, or about talking between New York and Chicago with a telephone. Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, who has written much about early life in New England, says that the farmers did not like railroads, for they thought that horses would soon be useless and would then be killed, and that there would be no demand for oats or hay. They were afraid, too, that the noise would frighten the hens so that they would not lay, that the sparks from the engine would burn up everything, and that the people would go crazy. There was some excuse for not enjoying railway travel, for the roadbeds were often made of solid rock, and the cars did not always have springs. The tracks were made of strap iron spiked down to wooden stringers. These iron straps would sometimes become loose, and had an unpleasant way of curling up and piercing the floor of the coach where people were sitting. In these days it is more comfortable and probably safer to ride in a railway train than behind a horse. The Empire State Express runs from New York to Buffalo in eight hours and twenty minutes. It makes but four stops on the way and covers more than fifty-three miles an hour. When we compare this with the packet-boat time-table of seventy-five years ago we see how much time is now saved. To-day a man can board the Twentieth Century Limited in New York City at 2.45 in the afternoon and be set down in Chicago the next morning. He can do business nearly all of one day by the sea, and nearly all of the next day on the shore of lake Michigan. On the way he will find easy chairs, books and papers, a good bed, a fine table, a place to write, to be shaved, or to take a bath, and he may even read from time to time the prices of stocks as they are sent over the wire from New York and Chicago. But our comfortable traveler should not despise the early days. Perhaps he misses some of the good times that the great-grandfathers had in the Mohawk boats and along the Genesee road. To go so fast and so far means that much has been done since the first small train came across the sand fields to Schenectady. Five years later the trains ran up to Utica. This was two hundred and two years after Arent Van Curler’s journey along the same river. In two years more a little road, twenty-five miles long, had been finished between Syracuse and Auburn; but it was not until 1839, when another winter had passed, that the link between Utica and Syracuse was completed. This ran much of the way through woods and swamps, and in some cases timbers or piles had to be driven deep to hold up the track. [Illustration: FIG. 19. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LIMITED]