It took great skill to sink the shaft on just the right line, and to make the parts of the tunnel exactly meet, as the men worked in from opposite directions. They brought the ends together under the mountain with a difference of only five sixteenths of an inch! You can measure this on a finger nail and see how much it is. The tremendous task was successfully accomplished, and Boston was no longer shut off from the rest of the country by the mountains. [Illustration: FIG. 5. THE SOUTH STATION, BOSTON] The end of it all is not that Boston has won all the ships away from New York, but that gradually she has been getting her share. Now she has great Cunarders, White Star Liners, and the Leyland boats,--all giant ships sailing for Liverpool,--and many other stately vessels bound for southern ports or foreign lands. Now you may see in Boston harbor not a forest of masts but great funnels painted to show the lines to which the boats belong, and marking a grander commerce than that which put out for the Indies long years ago; for to-day Boston is the second American port. The great freight yards of the railways are close upon the docks, and travelers from the West may come into either of two great stations, one of which is the largest railway terminal in the world. In and about Boston are more than a million people, reaching out with one hand for the riches of the great land to the west, and with the other passing them over the seas to the nations on the farther side. Man has taken a land of dense forests, stony hills, and wild valleys, and subdued it. It is dotted with cities, crossed by roads, and is one of the great gateways of North America. CHAPTER II PIONEERS OF THE MOHAWK AND THE HUDSON If a stranger from a distant land should come to New York, he might take an elevated train at the Battery and ride to the upper end of Harlem. He would then have seen Manhattan island, so named by the Indians, who but three hundred years ago built their wigwams there and paddled their canoes in the waters where great ships now wait for their cargoes. If the visitor should stay for a time, he might find that Harlem used to be spelled Haarlem, from a famous old town in Holland. He might walk through Bleecker street, or Cortlandt street, or see Stuyvesant square, and learn that these hard names belonged to old Dutch families; and if he studied history, he would find that the town was once called New Amsterdam and was settled by Dutchmen from Holland. They named the river on the west of the island the Great North river, to distinguish it from the Delaware, or Great South river, and they planned to keep all the land about these two streams and to call it New Netherland.