"Yet it is evident," the other said, "that it must have been done. It wouldn't be fair to tell a man to finish a district that represented seven or eight weeks' work, nor to promise a month's work to a man and then give him a district that had only two or three weeks' employment. You couldn't alter the districts afterwards, either, as everything had to be prepared in Washington for enumeration and tabulation by the original districts as mapped out." "You mean," said Hamilton, "that every square mile of territory in the United States, the number of people on it, the kind of land it was, the roads and trails, the distance from the nearest town, the rivers, and the location of bridges across them, and all that sort of thing had to be worked out in advance?" "Every acre," was the reply, "and the worst of it was that there was very little to go by. The lists for the last Decennial Census were only of use in the Eastern districts, for in the West large towns had grown up that were mere villages then. Whole sections of territory which were uninhabited ten years ago are thick with farms today and the 'Great American Desert' of a few years ago is becoming, under irrigation, the 'Great American Garden.'" "The Survey maps helped, I should think," said Hamilton. "I have a friend, Roger Doughty, on the Geological Survey, and he told me all about the making of the Topographic maps." "They helped, of course, but even with those it was hard to work out some of the queerly shaped districts. The supervisors helped us greatly after the larger districts had been planned, but the Geography division had to keep in touch with every detail until the entire country was divided into proportionately equal sections. "And you had to do that for Alaska, as well!" "As far as we could. Of course it was difficult to determine routes of travel there, and to a large extent that had to be left to the supervisors, but they merely revised our original districting. It took a lot of figuring in Alaska because of the tremendous travel difficulties there and the thousands of miles of territory still unsurveyed." "I had never realized the need of all that preparatory work," the boy admitted. "There's a great deal of the work that has to be done in the years before the census and in the years after," he was informed, "and the Bureau is kept just as busy as it can be, all the while. The Decennial Census, although it is the biggest part of the census work, is only one of its many branches, and then there are always other matters being looked after, like the Quinquennial Census of Manufactures, and such numberings as those of the Religious Bodies and the Marriage and Divorce Statistics of a few years ago." "I understood the Bureau had regular work all the year round?" Hamilton said.