We were coming around a curve near Nicholsen, Pennsylvania, approaching a stream which traversed this great valley, when across it from ridge’s edge to ridge’s edge suddenly appeared a great white stone or concrete viaduct or bridge—we could not tell at once which—a thing so colossal and impressive that we instantly had Speed stop the car so that we might remain and gaze at it. Ten huge arches—each say two hundred feet wide and two hundred feet high—were topped by eleven other arches say fifteen feet wide and forty feet high, and this whole surmounted by a great roadbed carrying several railway tracks, we assumed. The builders were still at work on it. As before the great Cathedral at Rouen or Amiens or Canterbury, or those giant baths in Rome which so gratify the imagination, so here, at Nicholsen, in a valley celebrated for nothing in particular and at the edge of a town of no size, we stood before this vast structure, gazing in a kind of awe. These arches! How really beautiful they were, how wide, how high, how noble, how symmetrically planned! And the smaller arches above, for all the actually huge size, how delicate and lightsomely graceful! How could they carry a heavy train so high in the air? But there they were, nearly two hundred and forty feet above us from the stream’s surface, as we discovered afterwards, and the whole structure nearly twentyfour hundred feet long. We learned that it was the work of a great railroad corporation—a part of a scheme for straightening and shortening its line about three miles!—which incidentally was leaving a monument to the American of this day which would be stared at in centuries to come as evidencing the courage, the resourcefulness, the taste, the wealth, the commerce and the force of the time in which we are living—now.
THE GREAT BRIDGE AT NICHOLSEN
It is rather odd to stand in the presence of so great a thing in the making and realize that you are looking at one of the true wonders of the world. As I did so I could not help thinking of all the great wonders America has already produced—capitals, halls, universities, bridges, monuments, water flumes, sea walls, dams, towering structures—yet the thought came to me how little of all that will yet be accomplished have we seen. What towers, what bridges, what palaces, what roads will not yet come! Numerous as these great things already are—a statue of Lincoln in Chicago, a building by Woolworth in New York, a sea wall at Galveston, an Ashokan dam in the Catskills, this bridge at Nicholsen—yet in times to come there will be thousands of these wonders—possibly hundreds of thousands where now there are hundreds. A great free people is hard at work day after day building, building, building—and for what? Sometimes I think, like the forces and processes which produce embryonic life here or the coral islands in the Pacific, vast intelligences and personalities are at work, producing worlds and nations. As a child is builded in the womb, so is a star. We socalled individuals are probably no more than mere cell forms constructing something in whose subsequent movements, passions, powers we shall have no share whatsoever. Does the momentary cell life in the womb show in the subsequent powers of the man? Will we show in the subsequent life of the nation that we have helped build? When one thinks of how little of all that is or will be one has any part in—are we not such stuff as dreams are made of, and can we feel anything but a slave’s resignation?
While we were sightseeing, Speed was conducting a social conference of his own in the shade of some trees in one of the quiet streets of Nicholsen. I think I have never seen anyone with a greater innate attraction for boys. Speed was only twentyfive himself. Boys seemed to understand Speed and to be hail-fellow-well-met with him, wherever he was. In Dover, at the Water Gap, in Wilkes-Barré, Scranton—wherever we chanced to stop, there was a boy or boys. He or they drew near and a general conversation ensued. In so far as I could see, the mystery consisted of nothing more than a natural ability on Speed’s part to take them at their own value and on their own terms. He was just like any other boy among them, questioning and answering quite as if he and they were all grownups and very serious. Here in Nicholsen, as we came back, no less than five youngsters were explaining to him all the facts and wonders of the great bridge.
“Yes, and one man fell from the top of them there little arches way up there last winter down to the back of the big arch and he almost died.”
“Those little arches are forty feet above the big ones,” another went on.
“Yes, but he didn’t die,” put in another informatively. “He just, now, broke his back. But he almost died, though. He can’t do any more work.”
“That’s too bad,” I said, “and how does he manage to live now?”
“Well, his wife supports him, I believe,” put in one quietly.