In the year 1901 an American ship and American railway trains ran a great race to London over land and sea. The start was from Australia and the distance was more than thirteen thousand miles. The race was not against other ships and other trains, but against time. The mail from Sydney in New South Wales usually went by the Red sea and the Suez canal, a route which is a thousand miles shorter than is the Pacific route, and which took thirty-five days and a few hours. It happened on August 13, in the morning, that three hundred and sixty-seven sacks of important mail for London were piled on the dock, beside which lay a new American ship, the _Ventura_. Because no good British ship was at hand that morning, the post-office authorities thought that they would let the vessel with the Stars and Stripes carry the mail. She did carry it, and on the evening of September 2 she laid down the bags on the pier at San Francisco. The American railroads tried their hand at carrying the British mail. The Southern Pacific took it swiftly across to Ogden, in Utah. The Union Pacific seized it, two hours late, and said that the time should be made up. The train raced a thousand miles to Omaha and made up some of the time but not all. Then it was off for Chicago, where the Lake Shore road had a “special” ready to overtake the Fast Mail. It ran two hundred and forty-four miles in two hundred and sixty-five and a half minutes, and did overtake it. Then came Buffalo, New York, Queenstown, and London. The carriers in that great city started out with the mail early in the morning of September 14. If the bags had come by the shorter route under the British flag, they would not have reached London until September 16. This is what great railways and great ships do in our time,--they make neighbors of all men. [Illustration: FIG. 43. THE OBSERVATION END, BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD] CHAPTER X CITIES OF THE OHIO VALLEY If we look at a map, we shall see that the Allegheny river flows southward from New York into western Pennsylvania. The Monongahela river, rising among the rough highlands of West Virginia, sends its waters toward the north, and the two great streams join to form the Ohio, which flows on far to the southwest. All together they are like wide-spreading branches of an apple tree uniting with the gnarled old trunk. In the great crotch of the tree Pittsburg is snugly placed. A narrow point of flat land lies between the rivers just before they come together to make the Ohio, and back of this point, to the east, rise steep hills. Across the Allegheny and across the Monongahela the banks rise sharply for several hundred feet, and there too, wherever the slope is not too steep for houses to stand, tens of thousands of busy people have their homes. [Illustration: FIG. 44. OLD BLOCKHOUSE, PITTSBURG]