"We have tonnage in this town," says the proud resident of Pittsburgh, "and if you won't believe what I tell you about the water traffic, how about our neat little railroad business? If you won't listen to our harbor-master here when I take you down to him, look at the lines of freight cars for forty miles out every trunk-line railroad that gets in here. This is the real gathering ground for all the freight rolling-stock of this land." And then he falls to telling the native of Manhattan island how all that traffic has come to pass--how a mere quarter of a century ago the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroad had offered itself to the historic Erie for a mere hundred thousand dollars--and had been refused as not worth while. Today the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie is the pet child of the entire Vanderbilt family of aristocratic railroads, earning more clear profit to the mile than any other railroad in the world. The Pittsburgh man makes this all clear to his caller. But the man from New York only looks out again upon the city in semi-darkness at midday, and thinks of the towers of his own Manhattan rising high into the clearest blue sky that one might imagine, and whispers incoherently: "This Pittsburgh gets me." Pittsburgh gets some others, too. It gets them from the back country, green country lads filled with ambition rather than anything else, and if they have the sticking qualities it makes them millionaires, if that so happens that such is the scheme of their ambitions. It has made some other millionaires, almost overnight, as we shall see in a few minutes. The picking for dollars seems good in the neighborhood of the confluence of the Monongahela and the Allegheny. Consider for a moment that confluence--the geography of Pittsburgh, if you please. In a general way the older part of the town has a situation not unlike that of the great metropolis of the continent. For New York's East river, substitute the Monongahela; for the Hudson, the Allegheny; and let the Ohio, beginning its long course at the Point--Pittsburgh's Battery--represent the two harbors of New York. Then you will begin to get the rough resemblance. To the south of the Monongahela, Pittsburgh's Brooklyn is Birmingham, set under the half-day shadows of the towering cliffs of Mount Washington. Allegheny--now a part of the city of Pittsburgh and beginning to be known semi-officially as the North Side--corresponds in location with Jersey City. And the problems that have beset Pittsburgh in her growth have been almost the very problems that from the first have hampered the growth of metropolitan New York. If her rivers have been no such stupendous affairs as the Hudson or the East rivers, the overpowering hills and mountains that close in upon her on every side have presented barriers of equal magnitude. To conquer them has been the labor of many tunnels and of steep inclined railroads, the like of which are not to be seen in any great city in America. It has been no easy conquest.