T JOHN FINDLEY WALLACE The Builder of the HE actual head of the working force which will dig and construct the great Panama Canal will be Mr. John Findley Wallace, of Chicago, one of the best known of Western engineers and railway men. Mr. Wallace has just accepted his appoint ment as Chief Engineer of the Panama Canal Commission, at a salary understood to be twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He resigns his office as General Manager of the Illinois Central Railway. It is stated that the fact that Mr. Wallace is entirely free from political influence and complications was one of the considerations which led to his Canal choice. He had already been offered a place upon the Canal Commission, but had declined. Mr. Wallace is fifty-two years old, is of New England birth, but was educated in the West, and for more than thirty years has been engaged in the West in great engineering workssuch as the construction of the bridge over the Missouri at Sibley, and (at Rock Island, when he was an assistant engineer in the United States Engineering Corps) the excavation of a channel through the St. Louis chain of rocks by machinery of his own design and construction, an undertaking in which the Government previously had failed. "U A Day's Fishing in Colorado By Henry Martyn Hart Dean of St. John's Cathedral, Denver, Colorado "Aye, aye, and anything anything else you want, honey, and God bless you!" replies the genial ticket-master, who hands you a Pullman car ticket, with two coupons, in exchange for $2. He will also accommodate you with transportation for $14.30 the round trip, from Denver to Gunnison and back. "Why upper 5, when you can have a lower?" asks a youth, who evidently has intentions in the same direction. "For good and, to me, sufficient reasons. I always go upper, because you have a spring mattress, which not a little cushions the jar of the train; you are further away from the rumble of the wheels; you can command your own ventilation, which is above your head; you are not shut in, in a small box, but have plenty of air; and I used to think we were less liable to have visits from 66 the light-fingered fraternity, until one night I felt my trousers being pulled across my feet, a proceeding I promptly arrested by holding them tight against the partition, and my protruding head held converse with the colored porter, who visibly blanched as he stammered, 'Beg your pardon, suh; made a mistake." "And so you did, you shady piece of humanity; you thought I was asleep." As this is my sole experience of an attempted larceny on board a train, and as it occurred in an upper, I must modify my impression that the sleeper in an upper is less liable to such visitations than his inferior-until I hear more from the inferior." "More difficult to get in and out?" "Well, of course that is true; but the curse of this age is its avoidance of physical effort. Every man in the country will do an hour's thinking to devise some scheme by which he may avoid ten minutes' manual labor. This universal finds its way to the plains. These cañ disposition to shirk effort has so weakened the moral fiber of the community that we allow all sorts of wrong and lawlessness to parade in open day, and decline to take the necessary trouble to prevent the shameless show, lest for sooth we should suffer some! I there fore climb into an upper, and swing myself down, in some small defiance of the soft embrace of a wanton age, and do something towards practicing that hardness which is essential in a swimmer who makes any headway against the popular current. And I always ask for upper 5' because it is easier for everybody to have precise directions. Never leave room for the exercise of discretion; if you do, you give that much area for the play of all sorts of wantonness; very few people are fitted to be trusted with discretion. 5,' too, is about the middle of the car; you ride easier, and in case of accident and hold-ups the ends of the car are the dangerous places, and '5' is furthest away from both ends." Moreover, I will admit I have still another reason for selecting the number 5. In Scriptural symbolism, to which this material generation persists in closing its purblind eyes, 5 means "human imperfection;" ten fingers is the full capability of the man who works "with both hands heartily, as unto the Lord"— with five he does only half what he might. Now, as pride is the vitality of that Self which is a man's worst enemy, humility is its antidote. St. Augustine well said that there were three steps to heaven-Humility, Humility, Humility; the sense of imperfection is an incentive to humility, and that "Upper 5" is an abiding reminder of human imperfection; upon how many imperfect humans does the safety of the train depend! So, as I lay me down in upper 5 I am glad to think that my welfare is in the hands of "Him who doeth all thing well." If things are normal, all unconscious, we have sped south to Pueblo, then turned abruptly west, up the valley of the Arkansas, hugging the turbulent, muddy torrent as it plunges through the Royal Gorge. Grim rock sentinels two thousand feet high guard the entrance of the cañon down which the river ons, rifts in the flanks of the mountains, are all alike, varying only by a few hundred feet of height. Rock, rock interminable, endless rock. Never was there a better-applied descriptive adjective than that which some great unknown appended to these mountains; they are verily "Rocky Mountains." Fifteen hundred miles from the nearest sea, little moisture reaches them; no caps of eternal snow do their peaks wear; no green glaciers crawl down their mountain valleys, bringing verdure and coolness to the lowlands. At 5:15 we debouch upon an oval plateau circled by splendid mountains; here is Salida; we have come two hundred and fifteen miles. We for Gunnison now leave the broad gauge and take the narrow gauge. The former line, turning westward, mounts to that wonderful mining camp, Leadville, which lives and thrives at ten thousand feet above the sea level; while the latter makes for the Marshall Pass, and so over the range. As our Gunnison train does not leave until 6:45, we have a good hour in which to breakfast; and if you are a fisher who is bent upon economizing both time and money, save from your breakfast "a bite of lunch"-you will need it later on. Again the train begins to mount, performing engineering wonders as it zigzags up the highest bosom of the range. Splendid views unfold themselves as spurs are rounded and panoramas of stalwart peaks march across the field of view. The most picturesque of the ranges bears a thrilling name, "The Sangre de Christo." It trends south until it terminates abruptly at the San Luis Valley in a mighty and almost perpendicular escarpment. In the middle of that sheer precipice of crag the Indians see a spot of red; they say it is a drop of the blood of Christ, and whosoever climbs the face of the rock and, at risk of limbs or life, touches the reddened spot, is cleansed of sin. Colorado has many memories of the Spaniards, but none of more vital interest than this preachment of man's only salvation which they managed to commit to this spur of the everlasting hills. The summit of the Pass is reached at be accounted for by a fact which the experience of a fish-hatchery has reported. Three tanks of trout were differently fed; the first with liver, the second with grubs and "sich-like bait," the third with flies. The trout in the second tank grew twice as fast as those in the first, while the fly-fed fish increased in weight five times faster. Nor is this fact at all astonishing. Think of the concentration of energy which operates a fly; how terse and strenuous must be the material of his make-up; what a powerful machine to propel itself scores of times its own length in a minute and lift its own weight with an ease as though it were imponderable; what extraordinary vigor of life to vibrate its wings hundreds of times in a second. |