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half-empty flasks into his pockets and locked the car door upon its inmates. Like a wolf, he descended upon the laborers, where they shivered in the frigid sun-light, and he sent them running, filled with a new dread of his voice, to unbury the forges and the coal-bins, to shovel away tons of dirt from the concrete abutments and set a fire in the traveling crane. Thereafter for fourteen hours a man. learned of bridges, of tensions and T beams, of Fink trusses and gin poles, until an orange sun swam up through the clouds and the Hutchins blue-prints knew a new master.

There is no man among them all that can tell the whole story of those twenty-seven days. In the end there were four men less than when the first of the seven thousand rivets slipped into place. One man fell from the webbing into the ice-bound gorge below; the foreman went sheer out of his head one night, and ran screaming down the main line to freeze somewhere in the woods; and a third man the Tumbleweed shot in his tracks, because he led a mutiny against this fiend who paced the laterals, and cursed them all day long. They tell of days so cold that the charcoal died in the field-forges out on the arch, and midnight gales that snatched it from the hoods and tossed it like a flaming rocket into the gulf. There were endless rivet-holes reamed and reamed again because the beams shifted half an inch when the mercury sank at dawn. There was a red-faced official and a sleek negro-porter who toiled among the hand-cars with the meanest of them,-for a fanatic in an ice-coated sweater had marched them out of the car on the siding and wasted many cartridges about their heads. In the moist Neapolitan nights, to this date, there are black-eyed Italians who toss in their sleep and dream of a mountain cliff half way around the globe, where they toiled unendingly for a fire-eyed specter stalking among them, who gave them no pay and fed them half rations. Yet the bridge crept out and only a few died. Just as the fingers of ice used to shoot across the coffee in their tin buckets, reaching, darting from the edges in long fingers

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of frozen water, the bridge truss was thrust out into the air. All the daylight, like dozens of struggling insects, they swarmed over the iron-work, half frozen and dizzy from the haste of it all, but scarcely wasting a movement. They learned to drag whole heaps of numbered panel-beams along the track with a jerking locomotive, how to make three bolts hold where the specifications called for seven, and best of all, how to do two men's work for three weeks at a stretch.

The motive, the engineer, the brain of it all was the Tumbleweed. When a beam slipped from the slings and hung pendant over the chasm by one creaking cable, it was he who taught the numb fingers to loop another over the twisting monster and drag it taut and safe. When the mists engulfed the pass it was Orris the slave-driver, the ubiquitous, who stood at the anchor piers and kept them at work. It was the grub that told most on his ingenuity. He could deceive their eyes and their mouths with half a dozen adulterations of bean soup, but day after day their cheeks grew narrower and they could clinch one less bolt-head. The few white ptarmagins that the water-boys gleaned from the hill-sides made only a little broth. It was a matter of days before twelve men instead of six were loading the traveling crane. The master could shape a crude sort of floor-beam out of a forty-pound rail; if their aching arms lost a girder into the naked cañon, he could file a reamingbit out of hard steel and braze it into the sleeve if the tool broke short off; he could even rub their frozen faces. with snow until the glow sent them back to the sledgehammers, but feed them he could not.

At last the bridge was built, a crazy meandering structure that would shame a plumb line, that groaned and gave in every joint when the dry snow eddied over it, that cost the company eighteen thousand dollars in Pueblo steel, that was nothing it should have been, and all that a bridge should not be, from the fractures in the concrete abutments to the great gap where it failed to meet its fellow from across the

gulf-but it carried to a land of plenty forty-seven men, marooned and starving on a mountain peak. The Tumbleweed threw six-inch planks across the last few feet that separated the arch, and because the truss sprang away like a hickory splinter, beyond all mending, when they moved the fifty-ton traveler back to safety, he left it perched on the end of the span, to plunge into the ice-gorge below, when they were gone. Then, in a cloud of churning mist, they passed one by one over to the other side, and when one man fell in the crawling, they did not stop to gaze. The Tumbleweed, whose work was done, came more slowly after. For days, the peaks had been circling around his dizzy head, like artillery battalions on the wheel, and he must pick his way inch by inch.

How they broke open the stores, how they shovelled a track for the hand-cars from Great Gorge to the frozen, snowless meadows of the Park, how they feasted and the superintendent came back to his own, are not a part of this. For men have done such things before. A fiend with a Colt revolver and a ragged burnt sweater of gray tempered them in all things until the last drift was cut away from before the hand-cars. Then one night, when many blackeyed Italians and one convalescent railway official held a wild orgie at the junction-house, Orris slipped from them. Whither he went the people of the Southwestern cannot tell you, but sundry Italian laborers who boast of impossible bridges in impossible climates at the brink of precipices that could never exist, have a way of asking the interrogator if he can tell the whence and whither of a prairie tumbleweed. James Grafton Rogers.

NOTABILIA.

For the first time in ten years the judges for the LIT. prize essay have decided to withhold the award. In making this announcement, there are certain things to be explained. The essays submitted in the competition were, for the most part, good; but there was no distinctive one which stood apart from the rest. They were all on the average level of undergraduate production. The judges believe that, in consideration of a prize of such distinction as the LIT. medal, a winning essay should conform to a higher standard than the average of monthly contributions.

There will be those, doubtless, now (as there have been in the past) who will see by reason of this non-award, a waning in the literary spirit here, a decline of interest in the pursuit of culture for its own sake. Such utterances are absurd and the event has no such import. This is the first time it has failed of award in ten years. In the same length of time previously, it was withheld, not once, but six times; and no one can deny that the literary spirit flourished quite as vigorously here at Yale during those years, and subsequently, as at any previous time. It is interesting to note that after the medal was withheld in 1885, it failed to be awarded for three successive years. We hope that the withdrawal this year will inaugurate no such succession.

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The Board of Editors wish to express their thanks to Prof. Lounsbury and Prof. Phelps for consenting to act as judges in the competition.

PORTFOLIO.

THE TWILIGHT OF THE SNOW.

Night descends o'er snowy hilltops,
Fadeth the gold in the western sky;
Over the widespread shining uplands

The star of evening trembles high.
Down in the valley the dusk grows purple,

Lights from the farmhouse windows glow;
Afar on the hillsides the white world watches
In the twilight of the snow.

Low in the west o'er the cold blue mountains,
Lingers a long pale streak of light;
Deep in the firs of the lowland forests
Already reigns the gloom of night.
Out on the uplands the hilltops glimmer,
Stretching away in a ghostly row,
Over them brooding a silence lonesome-
'Tis the twilight of the snow.

THE BELLS
OF SPIRES.

C. W. Nichols.

-History had been making in the town of Spires and the town of Spires was resting after all the bustle and excitement of the Emperor's burial. Poor Henry IV, humbled at Canossa before the sneering prelates, hounded to resignation by his underlings, banished, insulted by his son and successor Henry V, had died in sorrow and bitterness attended only by his faithful servant Curt. The old Emperor's body had lain unburied and cursed by papal authority until a tardy justice had brought it to Spires, always attended by the servant Curt, and accorded it an honorable burial. It is not every day that an emperor is buried in any place and the after effects were plainly to be seen at Spires. Even the sun-dial on the town house gable had a dejected, tired, look, as if pointing the last twenty-four hours had been uncommon hard business. queer old houses leaning across the street as if trying to peer into the opposite windows, bore heavily against each other for

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