should have
been able to survive its constant buffetings at the hand of Fate, but
survive it has, and by eternal patience and unfailing perseverance these
many troubles were at length overcome, and if to-day the railway offers
facilities and comforts to the travelling public that stand the test of
comparison with such as are provided by the great trunk lines of England
and Scotland, it is no small tribute to those who have worked long and
labouring to bring its services to their present high standard of
efficiency.

But of the Cambrian as we know it to-day there will be something more to
be said presently. Biography, by time-honoured custom, if not necessity,
begins with birth and parentage; and, though corporate bodies may often
experience some difficulty about laying claim to a "lang pedigree," even
a railway company cannot come into existence without considerable
pre-natal labour.

Among its parents the Cambrian possessed some men of rare grit and
determination. Prominent among them was one who ranks high among the
makers of modern Wales, whose name has become a household word not only
in his native land, but wherever Welshmen congregate throughout the
world, and is still, by happy coincidence, intimately associated, in the
third generation, with the Cambrian to-day. The story of David Davies of
Llandinam has been fully told in other pages, {4} but it is so closely
woven around the romance of the railway which he did so much to bring
into being that no record of that undertaking would be complete without
some reference to it, however brief. Born at a small holding called
Draintewion, perched on the hillside overlooking the Severn Vale near
Llandinam, the eldest of a family of nine children, on December 18,
1818,--"three eighteens," as he used in later life jocularly to
remark--his boyhood was spent on the little plot of land tilling its rich
soil, or helping his father, in the work of sawing timber into planks, a
commodity for which public demand was then rapidly increasing. His only
schooling was received in a little seminary carried on in the village
church, and that wonderful educational institution of rural Wales, the
Sunday School. But at the age of eleven the desk was deserted for the
saw bench, and the rest of his instruction was derived at "the University
of Observation, in which he took not a mere 'pass' but very high
'honours'." A keen observation of human nature, a shrewd judgment of men
and beast