When the Government’s sympathy had been secured in a practical manner, the next step was to discover an engineer who could superintend the survey and conduct constructional operations. The country did not possess many Stephensons, and the work in contemplation was of such an unprecedented character that no ordinary engineer would prove equal to the task. Happily, however, there was in San Francisco a railway engineering genius whose ability was being wasted for lack of opportunity. This man was Theodore D. Judah. He was a born engineer, and his skill in railway engineering had achieved a peculiar distinction up and down the Pacific coast. This work was his sole hobby, and the greater the difficulties to be overcome, the more enthusiastically and determinedly he threw himself into the task. His efforts in this direction were so strenuous that he was regarded generally as a crank, and his great dreams of railway conquest provided a continual source of amusement. He was always diving into the mountains, reconnoitring the passes with a view to their suitability for carrying the steel highway, and openly admitting that his greatest ambition in life was to be given the chance to lift the metals over the gaunt Sierras frowning upon the Pacific coast, and to drop them on to the plains rolling eastwards from the opposite slopes. On one occasion he resigned his position upon a new railway line that was being built around San Francisco, and, unaccompanied, forced his way through the rocky barrier, making a mental note of the configuration of the country as he proceeded in case of something turning up, laboured across Nevada’s dreary wastes of alkali, skirted Salt Lake, and at last gained the Missouri. As a result of his frequent peregrinations among the mountains, his eye became trained expertly in spying out the suitability of the country for the iron road, and he became known under the sobriquet of “The Railway Pathfinder.” It was a picturesque nickname, but it was one which described his personality to the full. That his wanderings were not in vain is proved by the fact that nearly every pass through the mountains which he stated to be adapted to carry a railway has been pressed into this service since, in order to gain the Pacific coast.