of human life. Arrived at quaint, dull old Panama, the early adventurers long awaited with fierce impatience the steamers which were to have anticipated their coming, and been ready to speed them on their way; and many were goaded into taking passage on sailing vessels, which were months in beating up to the Golden Gate against the gentle but persistent breezes from the west and north-west which mainly prevail on that coast. Rarely has human endurance been put to severer tests than in the earlier years of gold-seeking travel by the Isthmus route to California. The Panama Railroad--commenced in 1850, and finished in 1855, at a total cost of $7,500,000, for a length of forty-seven and a half miles--very considerably reduced the expense, whether in time or money, of the Isthmus transit, diminishing its miseries and perils in still greater proportion. It is one of the noblest achievements, whereof our countrymen are fairly entitled to the full credit. A ship-canal or railroad across the Isthmus had been proposed, and commended, and surveyed for and estimated upon, by French, South American, and other officials and engineers; but the execution of the work was left to our countrymen, and not in vain. Contractor after contractor abandoned the undertaking in despair; hundreds, if not thousands, of laborers--Irish, Chinese, and others--were sacrificed to the deadly miasma of the swamps and tropical jungle which thickly stud the route. But the work was at last completed, and the railroad has now been some six years in constant operation, reducing the average length of the actual transit from a week to two hours, and its expense and peril to an inappreciable quantity. It is a cheering fact that the capitalists who invested their faith and their means in this beneficent enterprise have already had returned to them in dividends the full amount of their outlay, and are now receiving twenty per cent. per annum. Their road has shortened the average Isthmus passage to and from California by at least a full week, and immensely diminished the danger of loss by robbery, accident, or exposure, beside building up a large trade which but for it would have had no existence.