Yet Sydney Smith had a warm | slightest infliction of animal sufregard and thankfulness for those | ering." whom he designated, with happy alliteration, as “ vendors of velocity and traders in transition;" and when, at the age of seventy-three, he wrote to the papers, making the burden of his song "The good of ancient times let others state, I think it lucky I was born so late"he made it one of the subjects of rejoicing over the improvements he had experienced in life, that "it took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath before the invention of railroads, and I now go in six hours from Taunton to London." The Quarterly Review was the victim of complete reversal of its opinions on railways, and the same journal which ridiculed the steam carriage in one decade was fain to write thus of it in the next : Use has blunted the feelings of the people before whom the wonders of the railway were first unfolded; and what Sir E. Head wrote many years ago in his Stokers and Pokers is more and more applicable as time has developed its marvels : "When railways were first established, every living being gazed at a passing train with astonishment and fear! ploughmen held their breath; the loose horse galloped from it, and then, suddenly stopping, turned round, stared at it, and at last snorted aloud. But the nine days' wonder' soon came to an end. As the train now flies through our verdant fields, the cattle grazing at each side do not even raise their heads to look at it; the timid sheep fears it no more than the wind; indeed, the hen-partridge, running with her brood along the embankment of a deep cutting does not even crouch as it passes close by her. It is the same with mankind. On entering a railway station we merely mutter to a clerk in a box where we want to go-say 'How much ?' — see him horizontally poke a card into a little machine that pinches it—receive our ticket —take our place—read our newspaper-on reaching our terminus drive away perfectly careless of all or of any one of the innumerable arrangements necessary for the "On recovering from the confusion consequent on passing rapidly through the air, one of the most pleasing novelties which first attract the attention of the raveller as, seated in his elbow hair, he joyously skims across the green fields, is to see the horses grazing at liberty in rich pasture, for t reminds him that the power of team has at last emancipated those noble quadrupeds from the toilome duties which, in the service f our mails and coaches, they ave so long and so gallantly ndergone, and that thus, for he first time in his life, he is astonishing ravelling on land without the enjoyed." luxury we have CHAPTER IIL. So I left my own valley, where soft waters shine, I joined the wild navvies to work on the line, And dwell far away in the stranger's rude home, Where the black mountains rise and the brown rivers foam. ARKABLE RAILWAY WORKS-THE CHAT MOSS-BRIDGE AT CHEPSTOW -THE THAMES TUNNEL THE EUSTON STATION-THE KILSBY AND WATFORD TUNNELS-THE BRITANNIA BRIDGE-THE SOUTH DEVON NIAGARA SUSPENSION BRIDGE-THE VICTORIA BRIDGE, ST. LAWRENCE-THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL-THE CHANNEL TUNNEL-TRESTLE BRIDGES IN AMERICA-THE TAY BRIDGE. VIADUCTS-THE REMARKABLE RAILWAY WORKS. ¿construction of railways, has, in every country, to a greater ss extent, called into play the est and most brilliant efforts e civil engineer. We have with how much admiration wonder the canal works of lley and others were regarded he previous century; but her we regard the extent of works generally, or the special nces in which engineering has been developed, the ay works of the nineteenth ry far eclipse anything in >revious history of engineer A favourite example to 1 appeal is made when conare to be drawn between the present and the past, is that of the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Taking up this example, one of the assistant engineers of the London and Birmingham line wrought out a comparison not very favourable to the boasted labour of Cheops. The ingenious writer reduces the works of this Pyramid to the well-known mechanical unit of the "foot pound,” and proceeds to work out the following calculation. "After making the necessary allowance for the foundations, galleries, etc., and reducing the same to one uniform denomination, it will be found that the labour expended on the Great Pyramid was equivalent to raising 15,763,000,000 cubic feet | Deluge !) should be crossed by a of stone one foot high. This solid railway, an opposing engineer labour was performed, according of great eminence declared it was to Diodorus Siculus, by 300,000 a thing which "no man in his men, and according to Herodotus senses " would undertake to do. by 100,000 men, and it required George Stephenson, however, refor its execution twenty years. If solved to do it, and after severe we reduce in the same manner the labour and the exercise of much labour expended in constructing ingenuity, the task was accomthe London and Birmingham Rail- | plished. The drainage of the way to one common denomination, the result is 25,000,000,000 cubic feet of material reduced to the same weight as that used in constructing the pyramid, lifted | one foot high, or 9,267,000,000 cubic feet more than were lifted one foot high in the construction of the pyramid. Yet this immense undertaking has been performed by about 20,000 men in less than five years." In this calculation, it is to be remembered that Cheops had not the aid of steam in his work, but possibly that remark lessens the value of the contrast as in favour of the modern engineer. THE CHAT Moss. One of the most remarkable achievements in railway engineering was also one of the earliest, namely, the construction of a road over the Chat Moss, a bog with an area of twelve square miles, and of such softness that cattle could not walk on it, and in many parts of which a piece of iron would sink by its own weight. When the proposal was before Parliament that this bog (which was supposed to have had its origin at the Chat Moss was commenced in June 1826. Nothing more impassable could have been imagined than that dreary waste; and it was declared that no carriage could stand on it "short of the bottom." In this bog, singular to say, Mr. Roscoe, the accomplished historian of the Medicis, had buried his fortune in the hopeless attempt to cultivate it. Nevertheless, farming operations had for some time been going on, and were extending along the verge of the Moss; but the tilled ground, underneath which the bog extended, was so soft that the horses when ploughing were provided with flat-soled shoes to prevent their hoofs sinking deep into the soil. For weeks the stuff was poured in, and as little or no progress seemed to have been made, the directors of the railway became alarmed, fearing that the evil prognostications of the opposing engineers were about to be realised. But when Mr. Stephenson was asked for his opinion his invariable answer was, "We must persevere." Still the insatiable bog gasped for more material, which was emptied in truck-load after truck-load with out any apparent effect. Then a special meeting of the Board was summoned, and it was held upon the spot, to determine whether the work should be proceeded with or abandoned. Mr. Stephenson himself afterwards described the transaction at a public dinner given at Birmingham on the 23d of December 1837, on the occasion of a piece of plate being presented to his son, the engineer of the London and Birmingham Railway. He related the anecdote, he said, for the purpose of impressing upon the minds of all who heard him the necessity of perseverance. "After working for weeks and weeks," said he, "in filling in materials to form the road, there did not yet appear to be the least sign of our being able to raise the solid embankment one single inch: in short, we went on filling in without the slightest apparent effect. Even my assistants began to feel uneasy, and to doubt of the success of the scheme. The directors, too, spoke of it as a hopeless task, and at length they became seriously alarmed; so much so, indeed, that a Board meeting was held on Chat Moss to decide whether I should proceed any farther. They had previously taken the opinion of other engineers, who reported unfavourably. There was no help for it, however, but to go on. An immense outlay had been incurred; and great loss would have been occasioned had the scheme been then abandoned and the line taken by another route. So the directors were compelled to allow me to go on with my plans, of the ultimate success of which I myself never for one moment doubted. Determined, therefore, to persevere as before, I ordered the work to be carried on vigorously; and to the surprise of every one connected with the undertaking, in six months from the day on which the Board had held its special meeting on the Moss, a locomotive engine and carriage passed over the very spot with a party of the directors' friends on their way to dine at Manchester." This great and original work has, we believe, only one counterpart. A great part of the line from Norwich to Yarmouth, of which railway Mr. Stephenson was chairman, passes over a morass, formerly, no doubt, occupied by the sea, and which in many places is so soft that no animal can walk over it without sinking. The railway was constructed across these lowlands by fir-poles laid transversely and covered with fascines, upon which the permanent way is laid with light materials. There can be no doubt, though the passengers may not know it, that this is nothing more than a floating road. The plan of using hurdles interwoven with boughs was that adopted by Stephenson in laying the road over the Chat Moss. BRIDGE AT CHEPSTOW. Standing midway between Telford's suspension principle and Stephenson's tubular principle, as |