The two started up through the yards together, arm in arm. Jim's house was, as he had said, "quite a way;" in fact, it was nearly a mile away, straight out the railroad-track. The house was a large brick, which stood very near the track, so near, indeed, that one corner had been cut away to permit the railroad to get by. The house had been built there nearly a century before by some wealthy farmer who had never heard of a railroad, and never dreamed that his property would one day be wanted for a right of way. But the day came when the railroad's surveyors ran their line of stakes out from the town, along the river-bank, and up to the very door of the house itself. Condemnation proceedings were begun, the railroad secured the strip of land it wanted, and tore down the corner of the house which stood upon it. Whereupon the owner had walled up the opening and rented what remained of the building to such families as had nerves strong enough to ignore the roar and rumble of the trains, passing so near that they seemed hurling themselves through the very house itself. Allan knew it well. He had passed it many and many a time while he was working on section. Indeed, it was this old house, when he learned its history, which made him realize for the first time, how young, how very modern the railroad was. Looking at it--at its massive track, its enduring roadway carried on great fills and mighty bridges--it seemed as old, as venerable, as the rugged hills which frowned down upon the valley; it seemed that it must have been there from the dawn of time, that it was the product of a force greater than any now known to man. And yet, really, it had been in existence scarce half a century. Many men were living who had seen the first rail laid, who had welcomed the arrival of the first train, and who still recalled with mellow and tender memory the days of the stage-coach--a mode of travel which, seen through the prism of the years, quite eclipsed this new fashion in romance, in comfort, and in good-fellowship. This leviathan of steel and oak had grown like the beanstalk of Jack the Giant-killer--had spread and spread with incredible rapidity, until it reached, not from earth to heaven, but from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf. It had brought San Francisco as near Boston as was Philadelphia in the days of the post rider. The four days' stage journey from New York to Boston it covered in four hours. It had bound together into a concrete whole a country so vast that it equals in area the whole of Europe. And all this in little more than fifty years! Verily, there are modern labours of Hercules beside which the ancient ones seem mere child's play! "It's a long stretch," said Allan, looking back, through the gathering darkness, along the way that they had come. "It must be nearly a mile from here to the station."