Uncle Sam never does anything on a small scale, and here, at headquarters, on the banks of the clear, silver river, where seven millions of dollars have been appropriated to unlock 660 miles of navigable water and 1,000 miles of tributary streams, all of which had been locked in the beginning of things and its key hidden to all save the unconquerable spirit of American enterprise, here everything was in keeping with the magnitude of the undertaking and the build and mold of things. It is a paradise in the woods, an Arcadia in primeval forests. It is strength and beauty—a touch of modern art on a background of the antique, a background of rock and beetling cliff, in a setting of sternest and ruggedest realism. Modern houses for offices on the brow of a rock, whose crinkled lips smile a grim and perpetual smile, as if enjoying the joke that a few thousand years will make in the change of man’s baubles above it. Handsome government buildings on a level plateau, surrounded with silence and eternal hills, which half-mockingly look down, as if to say, “Did we not see it ten thousand years ago, when another civilization did the same?” Steel aqueducts, leading captive waters across Shoal creek—a tube of steel binding the waist of this barbarian of the woods, that civilization might walk over his breast—water flowing across water, and that below grumbling with spiteful whirl and jealousy at the usurpation above. A rare picture of the present and the past, of strength and weakness, of beauty and grandeur, but above all the never-changing setting of eternal hills, and through it all the sigh of perpetual silence unbroken by this ripple of living laughter which scarcely touches the skirts of its dream. No prettier ride than that on the little government railroad which runs for fourteen miles on the edge of the canals and locks, and between it and the river. Now it shoots through classic-looking caves, in somber woods, that brings to one’s mind Keats’ Temple of Latona: Beyond the matron temple of Latona Which we should see but for these darkening boughs Lies a deep hollow from whose ragged brows Bushes and trees do lean all round athwart. Now it whirls around a great, lofty cliff, around whose neck the red berries cling like beads on savage shoulders, and then into valleys where the skies seem to stoop down to kiss the river. It is a poem to look at all this—a never-forgotten poem—a poem, and an opera to live and act it. * * * * *