l
it was made known that the crisis was past. No reason was alleged for
the crime except a blind dislike to the Royal Family; and O'Farrell was
subsequently tried and executed.

[Illustration: THE LITHGOW ZIGZAG, THE BLUE MOUNTAINS.]

#3. Railway Construction.#--New South Wales has three main lines of
railway with many branches. One starts from Sydney, and passes through
Goulburn to Albury on its way to Melbourne; one goes north to Newcastle,
then through the New England district, and so to Brisbane; and the third
runs from Sydney over the Blue Mountains to Bathurst, and away to
Bourke, on the Darling River. Those rugged heights, which so long
opposed the westward progress of the early colonists, have proved no
insuperable barrier to the engineer; and the locomotive now slowly
puffs up the steep inclines and drags its long line of heavily-laden
trucks where Macquarie's road, with so much trouble, was carried in
1815. The first difficulty which had to be encountered was at a long
valley named Knapsack Gully. Here the rails had to be laid on a great
viaduct, where the trains run above the tops of the tallest trees. The
engineers had next to undertake the formidable task of conducting the
line up a steep and rocky incline, seven hundred feet in height. This
was effected by cutting a "zigzag" in the rock; the trains run first to
the left, rising upon a slight incline; then, reversing, they go to the
right, still mounting slightly upwards; then, again, to the left; and so
on till the summit is reached. By these means the short distance is
rendered long, but the abrupt steepness of the hill is reduced to a
gentle inclination. The trains afterwards run along the top of the
ridge, gradually rising, till, at the highest point, they are three
thousand five hundred feet above the level of the Sydney station. The
passengers look down from the mountain tops on the forest-clad valleys
far below; they speed along vast embankments or dash through passages
cut in the solid rock, whose sides tower above them to the height of an
ordinary steeple. In some places long tunnels were bored, so that the
trains now enter a hill at one side and emerge from the other.

One of these tunnels was thought to be unsafe; the immense mass of rock
above it seemed likely to crush downwards upon the passage, and the
engineers thought that their best course would be to remove the hill
from above it. Three and a half tons of gunpowder were placed at
inte