on of bridges across them, and all that sort of thing had to
be worked out in advance?"

"Every acre," was the reply, "and the worst of it was that there was
very little to go by. The lists for the last Decennial Census were only
of use in the Eastern districts, for in the West large towns had grown
up that were mere villages then. Whole sections of territory which were
uninhabited ten years ago are thick with farms today and the 'Great
American Desert' of a few years ago is becoming, under irrigation, the
'Great American Garden.'"

"The Survey maps helped, I should think," said Hamilton. "I have a
friend, Roger Doughty, on the Geological Survey, and he told me all
about the making of the Topographic maps."

"They helped, of course, but even with those it was hard to work out
some of the queerly shaped districts. The supervisors helped us greatly
after the larger districts had been planned, but the Geography division
had to keep in touch with every detail until the entire country was
divided into proportionately equal sections.

"And you had to do that for Alaska, as well!"

"As far as we could. Of course it was difficult to determine routes of
travel there, and to a large extent that had to be left to the
supervisors, but they merely revised our original districting. It took a
lot of figuring in Alaska because of the tremendous travel difficulties
there and the thousands of miles of territory still unsurveyed."

"I had never realized the need of all that preparatory work," the boy
admitted.

"There's a great deal of the work that has to be done in the years
before the census and in the years after," he was informed, "and the
Bureau is kept just as busy as it can be, all the while. The Decennial
Census, although it is the biggest part of the census work, is only one
of its many branches, and then there are always other matters being
looked after, like the Quinquennial Census of Manufactures, and such
numberings as those of the Religious Bodies and the Marriage and Divorce
Statistics of a few years ago."

"I understood the Bureau had regular work all the year round?" Hamilton
said.

"Indeed it has. All the births and deaths that are registered are
tabulated here, and a number of tables of vital statistics are worked
out which are of immense value to doctors not only in the United States
but all over the world. Then, as I think you know, we have for years
made a special study of cotton crop conditions, and ther