look like ants upon a wall; but at close range you may perhaps look through their coating of dust and sweat and perceive they are indeed human beings. At four o'clock in the morning with the first peep of day you will hear their hammers echoing from crag to crag. At midday they sleep; for nobody could endure to work in a steel pipe that the sun has made too hot even to touch. And in the cool evening you will hear them again, like Rip Van Winkle's gnomes.

So the great project is fairly started. Mighty hard work-desperately hard work this engineering water power out of a wilderness! But the hardest and cruelest of it all is freighting in the material. Thousands of car-loads of cement, lumber, powder, and machinery are to be transferred to wagons at the poky little station in the foot-hills and teamed seventy miles over heart-break

so very slowly, they creep and wallow on-the driver shouting monotonously at his stock, guiding them with a single rein or occasionally leaving his saddle to run ahead and lash some particularly weary and lop-eared unfortunate with his heavy whip. But materials we must have, even at fifteen dollars a ton.

Here, then, are near a hundred miles of the wildest country in which toil and live a thousand men, their hundreds of live-stock, their score of concrete-mixers, their dozen camps, their long procession of freight. They require these thousands of tons of material and fuel; blankets, clothing, tobacco, doctors, surgeons, dentists, barbers; now and then, poor chaps, a priest and an embalmer to ship what is left of them home. Their great timber-and-tar-paper diningrooms with their long rows of tin plates must be supplied with the best of food.

Many a man can run a store or a hotel or a job; but who is the man who can run six big hotels, six general stores, six overworked livery - stables, a few machine-shops and smithies, an overloaded stage line, and a great power development besides? Perhaps you have met great men before-a victorious general, a great statesman, or a king or two? Then you will not fail to recognize the superintendent of construction when you meet him on the trail.

In spite of the dust and roughness of his surroundings he will be riding a beautiful clean-limbed horse, groomed to the last degree of sleekness. His thin white ridingshirt will be spotless, his riding-breeches creased, his putties polished. Although you know he rarely sleeps twice in the same bed and carries no baggage, yet he will appear miraculously fresh and cleanshaven and cool. You will particularly notice his austere bronze countenance, his observant gray eye under his straw helmet, and the level firmness of his voice as he dictates to his stenographer who rides beside him. Much of his ability depends on the fact that he does not try to do everything himself, but wisely chooses his lieutenants; yet if you were to question him about this great project you would be astonished at the tremendous amount of detail he carries in his head.

He knows the date of arrival of the first shipment of generators from New York, and when the steel pipe from Germany arrives in San Francisco, how many cars of cement are in each warehouse, what the next teamster has on his wagon, and the next, and the next after him; what section of the penstock they are riveting in place this afternoon, and the number of the blue print to refer you to for this or that construction. And yet through this mass of detail he sees clearly and largely the whole undertaking. There is no accounting for such a man. May be he was at the head of his class at college, and may be he was just a barefoot farm-boy who ran away and worked on the railroad. He is spending five million dollars a year and drawing a very few thousands for himself. He has been everywhere on the semi-civilized globe, but if you ask him what he would rather do than anything else, he will tell you it is to settle down on a farm again, so that he could get re-acquainted with his wife and

send his sons to a good school under the American flag. This is a myth; but he believes it himself, not realizing that he is an incurable gypsy. There is a vast amount of adventure and romance in his life, but a great deal of loneliness and privation too, and he is bound withal to be a great and very brave man.

Well, there is a year or two or three of this, and then things begin to be finished. Under our high-swung cables over the green meadow has grown a huge dam block by block, course by course, and the meadow is no more. In its stead, reflecting the blue sky, lies a lovely lake—and none the less fair for being artificial. The tunnel-drillers have met head on at the tunnel's midpoint, and the muffled thunder of their blasting has died away. The scar of the ditch along the mountain flank is beginning to heal over with undergrowth. The penstock rises, a sleek black column against the mountain, a thousand feet high. At its lower end is a rectangular web with insects crawling over it-in reality a power-house with the steel erectors still busy on it-and if we can trust ourselves to the silent driver of the hoist and huddle upon his little cable car, he will let us swiftly down to it-stiffening our hair and dislodging our commissaries by the way-and we may see what is going on within. During our descent a measured clang, as from a Cyclop's forge, echoes through the canyon, and upon arriving we find sweating machinists with a battering-ram pounding home the last bolts that hold the cast-steel buckets on the caststeel wheels.

Such wonderful wheels, these! Just plain steel disks, not so big as the drivers of a locomotive, but capable of a thousand turns a minute without bursting, with but a score of buckets on their rim exactly the shape of a clam-shell opened out flat, but largermore like the halves of a muskmelon scraped thin and pressed closely side by side. But it has taken near a generation of experiment and calculation to develop their exact shape and exact curves to the point where they can receive the impact of our high mountain stream, shooting from the big nozzles with force enough to pierce a brick wall, and turn the maximum amount of its energy into mechanical or electrical power. The inventor and patentee of these wondrous water-wheels is here to start