-springs; but hitherto, in
consequence of being out of the way of traffic, and there being only
wretched cars drawn by cows, as the means of locomotion, this great
mineral wealth has been locked up, and next thing to useless. What an
outlet will the Strasbourg and Manheim Railway furnish! Paris may be
as well and as cheaply supplied with coal as London.

Belgium--a kind of little England--has for a number of years been well
provided with railways; and you may go by locomotion towards its
frontiers in all directions, except one--namely, that of Holland. This
odd exception, of course, arose from the ill-will that has subsisted
for a number of years between the Belgians and Dutch; the latter being
not at all pleased with the violent disjunction of the Netherlands.
However, that coolness is now passing off. The two neighbours begin to
find that ill-nature does not pay, and, like sensible people, are
negotiating for a physical union by rail, seeing that a political one
is out of the question. In short, a railway is proposed to be laid
down in an easterly direction from the Antwerp branch, towards the
border of Holland; and by means of steam-boat ferries across the Maas
and other mouths of the Rhine, the junction will be effected with the
Rotterdam and Amsterdam series of railways. The north of Holland is
yet a stranger to railways, nor are the towns of such importance as to
lead us to expect any great doings there. But the north German
region--from the frontiers of Holland to those of Russia and Poland, a
distance of something like 1000 miles--is rapidly filling up the
chasms in its railway net-work. Emden and Osnaburg and Gottingen in
the west, Danzig and Koenigsberg and Memel in the east, are yet
unprovided; but almost all the other towns of any note in Prussia and
North Germany are now linked together, and most or all of the above
six will be so in a few years.

The Scandinavian countries are more interesting in respect to our
present subject, on account of _their_ railway enterprises being
wholly written in the future tense. Denmark has so little continuous
land, Sweden has so many lakes, and Norway so many mountains, that,
irrespective of other circumstances, railways have not yet reached
those countries. They are about to do so, however. Hitherto, Denmark
has received almost the whole of its foreign commodities _via_ the two
Hanse towns--Hamburg and Bremen; and has exported its cattle and
transmitted its mails by the