Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody. One trip it “barked” the Secretary’s elbow; the next trip it hurt me in the stomach, and the third it tilted Bemis’s nose up till he could look down his nostrils—he said. The pistols and coin soon settled to the bottom, but the pipes, pipe-stems, tobacco and canteens clattered and floundered after the Dictionary every time it made an assault on us, and aided and abetted the book by spilling tobacco in our eyes, and water down our backs. Still, all things considered, it was a very comfortable night. It wore gradually away, and when at last a cold gray light was visible through the puckers and chinks in the curtains, we yawned and stretched with satisfaction, shed our cocoons, and felt that we had slept as much as was necessary. By and by, as the sun rose up and warmed the world, we pulled off our clothes and got ready for breakfast. We were just pleasantly in time, for five minutes afterward the driver sent the weird music of his bugle winding over the grassy solitudes, and presently we detected a low hut or two in the distance. Then the rattling of the coach, the clatter of our six horses’ hoofs, and the driver’s crisp commands, awoke to a louder and stronger emphasis, and we went sweeping down on the station at our smartest speed. _It was fascinating—that old Overland stagecoaching._ The Coming of the Railroad One of the dramatic events of American history took place at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. On that day a golden spike was driven into the last stretch of track, and for the first time the East and West were linked by a railroad. After the spike-driving ceremony, the engineer of the Central Pacific, which had started east from San Francisco, and the engineer of the Union Pacific, which had been built west from the Mississippi, ran their engines up until they touched. Then they shook hands and broke champagne bottles over each other’s locomotive. There were speeches before and after, as gangs of Irish and Chinese laborers joined governors, railroad dignitaries and other notables in celebrating the momentous occasion. Walt Whitman Writes of the Continental Railroad To Walt Whitman this event had a highly emotional significance. It came in the same year that the Suez Canal was opened, and to Whitman the two events marked a great step forward in the advance of civilization. In his poem, “A Passage to India,” Whitman writes of the continental railroad: