neer contradict himself. He might as well try to
overturn Ailsa Crag. He of the impossible gradients is the hero of a
hundred committees, quite accustomed to legal artifice, cool, wary, and
self-collected. He receives every thrust with a pleasant smile, and
sometimes returns them with damaging effect. If close pressed, he is
conscious that behind him is a thicket of algebra, into which neither
counsel nor judges will dare to follow; and so fortified by the
mysteries of his calling, he is ready to defy the universe. Then come
the hordes of subordinate witnesses, the gentlemen who are to give
evidence for and against the bill. One side represents the country as
abounding in mineral produce and agricultural wealth: the other likens
it unto Patmos, or the stony Arabia. Tims swears that the people of his
district are mad, insane, rabid in favour of the line. Jenkins, his
next-door neighbour, on the contrary, protests that if the rails were
laid down to-morrow, they would be torn up by an insurrection of the
populace _en masse_. John thinks the Dreep-daily Extension is the only
one at all suited to supply the wants of the country; Sandy opines that
the Powhead's Junction is the true and genuine potato; and both John and
Sandy, Tims and Jenkins, are backed by a host of corroborators. Then
come the speeches of the counsel, and rare specimens they are of
unadulterated oratory. I swear to you, Bogle, that, no later than a week
ago, I listened to such a picture of Glasgow and the Clyde, from the
lips of a gentleman eminent alike in law and letters, as would have
thrown a diorama of Damascus into the shade. He had it all, sir, from
the orchards of Clydesdale to the banks of Bothwell, the pastoral
slopes of Ruglen, and the emerald solitudes of the Green. The river
flowed down towards the sea in translucent waves of crystal. From the
parapets of the bridge you watched the salmon cleaving their way upwards
in vivid lines of light. Never did Phoebus beam upon a lovelier object
than the fair suburb of the Gorbals, as seen from the Broomielaw,
reposing upon its shadow in perfect stillness. Then came the forest of
masts, the activity of the dockyards, and

"The impress of shipwrights, whose hard toil
Doth scarce divide the Sunday from the week."

Further down, the villas of the merchant princes burst upon your view,
each of them a perfect Sirmio--then Port-Glasgow, half spanned by the
arch of a dissolving rainbow--Dumbarton, grand an