"An instrument was brought to his bedside and placed under his hand. He received the doctor's message that his wound was fatal, received the farewell of his wife, then telegraphed her an eternal good-by, and as he finished it his fingers clutched the key, and in a moment he lay dead. I was one of the group that stood in the Adelaide office that day, and you can easily believe that the scene moved everybody to tears."
The youths easily did believe it, for their own eyes were moist as they heard the sad story. The gentleman paused for one, two, in fact for several minutes, with his head turned away, and then resumed:
"The success of the telegraph has emboldened us, and we are now building a railway along the same line, and hope to have it done within the next ten years. Four hundred miles are completed northward from Adelaide, and on the other side of the continent half that distance is in the hands of contractors. Camels are employed to carry supplies, material, and water to the men in advance of the end of the track, and the work is being pushed forward very much as your builders in America constructed the Central and Union Pacific railways across the great plains east of the Rocky Mountains, and between those mountains and the Sierra Nevada range."
GOVERNMENT HOUSE AND GROUNDS, ADELAIDE.