For there was no hesitating. Within a very few days of the passing of the act creating the Erie Canal you could have seen surveyors and chainmen pushing out into the shadowy forest-land, driving five lines of stakes across New York toward the setting sun. These men, like those who sent them, were ridiculed everywhere they went by some of the people; but still the ringing blows grew fainter and fainter as those five lines of stakes crept on up the Mohawk, along the Seneca, through poisonous swamps, on the banks of running rivers, around the shores of the still-lying lakes. Those who ridiculed prophesied that next we would be building a bridge across the Atlantic, and then a tunnel to China beneath the Pacific; but the sneers and ridicule of that portion of the people that will be fools all the time could not stop those earnest stake-drivers or the small army of men, mostly Americans, who came in and worked with pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow. The two outer lines of stakes were sixty feet apart; this indicated the space from which the forest was to be cleared. Two lines of stakes within these, measuring forty feet apart, represented the exact width of the proposed canal; and the remaining single line of stakes located its mathematical centre. The whole distance of the canal from Albany to Buffalo was divided into three sections, and these sections were subdivided into very small portions, which were let to contractors. The first contract was signed June 27, 1817, and work was begun at historic Rome, New York, on the following Fourth of July, with appropriate ceremony. After a short address by one of the commissioners, Samuel Young, and amid a burst of artillery, Judge Richardson, the first contractor, threw out the first spadeful of earth. To present-day readers acquainted with so many wonderful feats of engineering of modern days, the history of the building of this canal must seem commonplace; the marvellous thing about it, after all, was its conception and the campaign of education which brought about its realization. One of the romantic phases of the story, that will forever be of interest to those of us who can never know a primeval forest, was the experience of the engineering corps crashing their way through the New York forests, where the surveyors' stakes could hardly be seen in the dense gloom. Machinery unknown in America at the time was called upon to perform this arduous labor of grubbing and clearing this sixty-foot aisle. One machine, working on the principle of an endless screw connected with a cable, a wheel, and a crank, enabled a single man to haul down a tree of the largest size without any cutting. The machine being located at a distance of one hundred feet from the foot of the tree, the cable was attached to the trunk fifty or sixty feet from the ground, a crank was turned, the screw revolved, and the tree was soon prostrated, as the force which could be exerted by this principle was irresistible.