ufficient to
insure it from inundation in seasons of freshet. The pass is forty-live miles in length, with a fall of from seventy to one hundred and twenty feet to the mile. Even in the best of order, with the finest weather, one is conscious of a feeling of insecurity as one side of the train looks down on nothing nearer than the river-bed, and the other seems ever just missing the projecting rocks. Now you dash across a bridge, and anon you dart into a tunnel.
But last winter (I think it was in February) the thing happened,—not the one we were looking for,—it is always the unexpected which happens,—something which might have been the most appalling accident in railway history occurred. More than a hundred acres of earth, softened and loosened, with its lower side cut away, rushed down upon the railroad, completely buiying a section of track, obliterating a tunnel, and forcing itfeelf one hundred and fifty feet up the opposite mountain, effectually damming the river between. Bails twisted and doubled up, with ties, tools, wagons, bridges, and shops, were carried up the mountain-side. The river being dammed formed a lake above from twenty to one hundred and fifty" feet in depth, which, however, soon forced a passage for itself, when the accumulated waters, in a wall seventy-five feet high, roared down the rocky chasm with race-horse speed, carrying trees, earth, and stones upon their hissing crest. A lake a mile and a half in length and sixty feet deep still remains as a memento of this startling occurrence. Not ten minutes before the slide plunged down, a freight-train passed the spot. Fancy runs on and asks, What if a passenger-train had been hurled across the river, or had been imprisoned in the tunnel ? Imagine archaeologists a thousand years hence, when people travel with wings, and railways are a thing of the past, exploring and coming upon such an imprisoned train, or even upon the buried tunnel,—what speculations ! I used to think this when my eyes beheld, painted all along the rocky cuts of the Hudson Biver Bailroad, the cabalistic letters I. X. L.: what would the scientists say in the year 5000, when cosmic dust had buried New York and its surroundings out of sight, about the meaning of these characters? The railroad has been rebuilt for a long distance on the opposite side of the river.
