d attention in place of
lofty disdain. Passengers have not got to cross the line for a fresh
ticket or to telegraph; the whole place is reformed. So much the
better for the traveller. But how little do these birds of passage
imagine the varied interest of the strange and even romantic story
which is hidden in this most unromantic spot, given over, as it
seems, to bricks and mortar!

Not that it ever had a history in the usual sense. There is but a
faint, dim legend that the great Sweyn halted with his army on this
hill--thence called Sweyn's dune, and so Swindon. There is a family
here whose ancestry goes back to the times of the Vikings; which was
in honour when Fair Rosamond bloomed at Woodstock; which fought in
the great Civil War. Nothing further. The real history, written in
iron and steel, of the place began forty years ago only. Then a
certain small party of gentlemen sat down to luncheon on the
greensward which was then where the platform is now. The furze was
in blossom around them; the rabbits frisked in and out of their
burrows; two or three distant farm-houses, one or two cottages,
these were all the signs of human habitation, except a few cart-ruts
indicating a track used for field purposes. There these gentlemen
lunched, and one among them, ay, two among them, meditated great
things, which the first planned, and the second lived to see realize
the most sanguine anticipations. These two gentlemen were Isambard
Brunel and Daniel Gooch. Driven away from the original plan, which
was to follow the old coach-road, they had come here to survey and
reconnoitre a possible track running in the valley at the northern
edge of the great range of Wiltshire Downs. They decided that here
should be their junction and their workshop. Immense sacrifices,
enormous expenditure, the directors of the new railway incurred in
their one great idea of getting it finished! They could not stay to
cart the earth from the cuttings to the places where it was required
for embanking, so where they excavated thousands of tons of clay
they purchased land to cast it upon out of their way; and where they
required an embankment they purchased a hill, and boldly removed it
to fill up the hollow. They could not stay for the seasons, for
proper weather to work in, and in consequence of this their clay
embankment, thrown up wet and saturated, swelled out, bulged at the
sides, and could not be made stable, till at last they drove rows of
piles on