prepared to lay ten miles in one day! The Union people were inclined to regard this as mere boasting, and the Vice-President of the company implied as much when he made an offer to bet ten thousand dollars that in one day such a stretch of railroad could not be well and truly laid. It is not on record that the bet was taken up. But the fact remains that it was made, that the Central army of workers heard of it, and that they determined to make good the pledge given in their name. So a day was fixed for the attempt. From the Union side men came to take note of the work and to measure it, and their verdict at the close of the day’s toil was that not only had the promised ten miles been constructed, but that the measurement showed two hundred feet over! And this, on the words of an authority, is how it was done:—When the car loaded with rails came to the end of the track, the two outer rails on either side were seized with iron nippers, hauled forward off the car, and laid on the ties by four men who attended exclusively to this work. Over these rails the cars were pushed forward and the process repeated. Then came a gang of men who half-drove the spikes and screwed on the fish-plates on the dropped rails. At a short interval behind these came a gang of Chinamen, who drove home the spikes already inserted and added the rest. A second squad of Chinamen followed, two deep, on each side of the single track, the inner men carrying shovels and the outer men wielding picks, their duty being to ballast the track. Every movement was thus carefully arranged, and there was no loss of time. The average rate of speed at which the work was done was 1 min. 47½ secs. to every 240 feet of perfected track. There was, of course, an army of disciplined helpers, whose duty it was to bring up the materials. In this great feat of construction more than four thousand men found employment in various capacities. When they had carried their line four miles further east, the Central and the Union men met each other, the point of connection being known as Promontory. Afterwards the two companies made an arrangement whereby the Union Pacific relinquished fifty-three miles of road to the Central, thus fixing on Ogden as the western terminus of the one line and the eastern terminus of the other. The popular belief is that the fifty-three miles were obtained by the Central Pacific directors as an acknowledgement of the greater engineering difficulties they had to overcome in laying their part of the track, and that they served a handicapping purpose at the end of this wonderful railroad competition.