toppage. Trevithick and Jones were of the
old-fashioned school of men who did not believe in impossibilities. The
fickle crowd, too, who had hurrahed like mad, hung back and said 'It
won't do'; but these heroes, the advance-guard of a race who had done
more to make England famous than battles by land or sea, sprang to the
ground and worked like Britons, never ceasing until they had repaired the
mishap, and then they rattled on, and finally reached their journey's
end. The return journey was a failure, on account of gradients and
curves, but the possibility of success was demonstrated; and from this
run on the Merthyr tramway the railway age--marked with throes and
suspense, delays, accidents, and misadventures--finally began."

AN AFFRIGHTED TOLL-KEEPER.

There is a story told by Coleridge about the steam engine which
Trevithick exhibited at work on a temporary railroad in London.
Trevithick and his partner Captain Vivian, prior to this exhibition were
riding on the carriage on the turnpike road near to Plymouth. It had
committed sundry damage in its course, knocking down the rails of a
gentleman's garden, when Vivian saw the toll-bar in front of them closed
he called to Trevithick to slacken speed which he did just in time to
save the gate. The affrighted toll-keeper instantly opened it. "What
have us got to pay?" asked Captain Vivian, careful as to honesty if
reckless as to grammar.

"Na-na-na-na!" stammered the poor man, trembling in every limb, with his
teeth chattering as if he had got the ague.

"What have us got to pay, I ask?"

"Na-noth-nothing to pay! My de-dear Mr. Devil, do drive as fast as you
can! Nothing to pay!"

AN EARLY RAILWAY.

More than twenty years before the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester
Railway, the celebrated engineer Trevithick constructed, not only a
locomotive engine, but also a railway, that the London public might see
with their own eyes what the new high pressure steam engine could effect,
and how greatly superior a railway was to a common road for locomotion.
The sister of Davies Gilbert named this engine "Catch me who can." The
following interesting account in a letter to a correspondent was given by
John Isaac Hawkins, an engineer well known in his day.

"Sir,--Observing that it is stated in your last number (No. 1232, dated
the 20th instant, page 269), under the head of 'Twenty-one Years'
Retrospect of the Railway System,' that the greatest sp