of the
Union Passenger Railroad at Richmond, Virginia. The methods were still
primitive, but the success was unequivocal. The hills of Richmond, up
which the mule, dragging a little car, had hitherto toiled, were now
easily surmounted by smoothly running cars that could attain fair speed,
and which operated with almost perfect precision.

The utility of the trolley road had been demonstrated on a large scale,
and the old horse-car lines were equipped as speedily as possible for
electric traction; new roads, embodying the new principle, were built, and
hundreds of other roads were projected.

The stock of the Sprague concern, which went begging in 1885 and a twelfth
of which could be bought for twenty-five thousand dollars two years later,
went soaring, and the question of capital for the carrying out of
experiments or for equipping projected lines, could now be had for the
asking.

WORK WAS TOO EASY.

That Was Why the Man Who Was to
Build the Subway Resigned His
Position as a Municipal Clerk.

John B. McDonald, the builder of the New York City Subway, began work in
the New York office of the Registry of Deeds. The work was easy and the
pay was fairly good. On the whole, it was just such a place as thousands
would look upon as highly desirable. McDonald thought otherwise, and
during his spare time he studied hard at scientific subjects. He had been
in the place a year when he came home one night with the announcement:

"I've thrown up my job."

"Why?"

"I want real work, and I'm going to have it."

He got it as timekeeper at the building of Boyd's Dam, part of the Croton
water system. The work was just what he wanted, and it was not long before
he became a foreman. Here his real ability showed itself, and he made such
progress that when he was twenty-three he was inspector of masonry on the
New York Central tunnel. Here he made his first bid for a sub-contract,
and it was accepted. The first work he ever did as a builder was the big
arch at Ninety-Sixth Street. He got other big contracts on the Boston and
Hoosac Tunnel, the building of the Lackawanna road from Binghamton to
Buffalo, the Georgian Bay branch of the Canadian Pacific, and a dozen
other roads in various parts of the country.

All this was easy for him, and it was not until he began the tunnel under
Baltimore for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad that he got the real work he
wanted. It was a tunnel through mud and quicksands, a tunnel that