all cars being crowded with passengers.

The success was complete, and all doubts seemed to vanish. From that
day the traffic over the road continued without interruption. To the
surprise of all, the passenger business became a very important
item, and better cars were quickly in demand.

The road is in use to-day, and I had the pleasure last year of
riding over a part of it. Of course it now looks in all respects
like a modern English road, but I was deeply moved by the thought
that it was there that George Stephenson built his first public
railway and achieved his first public triumph.

Stephenson was not unmindful of the importance of that step. He
said, on that occasion, to some young men, "Now, lads, I will tell
you that I think you will live to see the day (though I may not live
so long), when railways will come to supersede almost all other
methods of conveyance--when mail coaches will go by railway. The
time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working-man to ride
than to go on foot." He lived to see all that himself, and far more.

It is difficult for us to appreciate the popular surprise and
delight at that first railway excursion. We are so accustomed to
splendid engines, luxurious cars, and high speed, that we think
nothing of them; but when all were new--when coaches and carts on
highways were the sole reliance for passengers and freight--it was
astonishing indeed to see a "travelling engine," in charge of two
men, draw a train of forty cars and six hundred people!

Many men would have been satisfied with the result, but Stephenson
was not. He said there was no limit to the speed but the strength of
the machinery and the supply of steam. He saw there was no limit to
the load but the strength and weight of the locomotive, and no limit
to the weight but the strength of the rails and the character of the
road-bed; thus he early saw how progress was to be made.

But Stephenson's greatest triumph was yet to come. The Darlington
road was chiefly for coals, between small towns in a rough northern
county. The vast majority of English people heard nothing, and knew
nothing about it. Consequently when it was proposed to connect the
great commercial city of Liverpool with the great manufacturing city
of Manchester, forty miles away, by a railway, it was taken for
granted that the cars were to be drawn by horses. Nevertheless a
tram-road was opposed, first, by the Duke of Bridgewater, who had a
canal between