to say a conscious one, with needs and plans of its own” (259). Against the Day does not merely portray the railroad as a means of transporting troops and goods across borders, but employs it as a synecdoche for the inexorable progress of modernity and globalization. The rapid growth of electricity also plays an important role in the novel. The Columbian Exposition is famous for introducing electricity to the American public, and during the first few decades after the fair, the blessings of electricity found their way into American everyday life. Parts of the story are set in the mining town Telluride in Colorado, the first American city to get electric street-lighting, and when the villains Deuce and Sloat first visit the small mountain city, they are struckby its renowned “glaring nightlessness” (261). When the novel ends more than twenty years later, however, the street-lighting of Telluride has lost its novelty. During the course of the novel, electricity changes from being an exotic exhibit, an attraction in itself, into being taken for granted as a consumer good. Like the spread of the railroad, this process becomes particularly visible when viewed from above. After having ploughed the global skies for a couple of decades, the by now grizzled youngsters of the Chums of Chance return to their native United States towards the end of the novel, and as they fly westward across the continent, they notice a marked change: While crossing the Continent the boys had expressed wonder at how much more infected with light the