nd perhaps it was as well that the scheme
went no further, for it cost L35,000, and was a complete failure. The
shareholders lost every penny. One feels it ought to have succeeded. The
carriages or trucks were drawn by horses, and the wheels ran along
grooved iron rails. Anybody who had a cart which fitted might put it on
the rails and let his horse pull it along, if he paid the tolls, which
were not heavy. However, its life was short. The Croydon canal, opened
in 1809, robbed it of much of its heavy goods traffic, and the London
and Brighton railway demolished it altogether. This is how "Felix
Summerley" (his real name was Sir Henry Cole, and he liked a good walk
with a good dinner at the end of it) described the change in his
_Pleasure Excursions_ in 1846.

"A small single line, on which a miserable team of lean mules or
donkeys, some thirty years ago, might be seen crawling at the rate
of four miles in the hour, with small trucks of stone and lime
behind them.... Lean mules no longer crawl leisurely along the
little rails with trucks of stone, through Croydon, once perchance
during the day, but the whistle and rush of the locomotive, and the
whirr of the atmospheric, are now heard all day long."

Felix Summerley must be suspected of admiring the change. One who knew
old Croydon well, and admired its changes less, was John Ruskin, who had
relations there and visited them as a boy. Of one he writes in
_Praeterita_:--

"Of my father's ancestors I know nothing, nor of my mother's more
than that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the Old King's
Head in Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and
I could paint her Simone Memmi's King's Head, for a sign."

Of his aunt at Croydon he has a pleasant memory:--

"My aunt lived in the little house still standing--or which was so
four months ago--the fashionablest in Market Street, having actually
two windows over the shop, in the second story; but I never troubled
myself about that superior part of the mansion, unless my father
happened to be making drawings in Indian ink, when I would sit
reverently by and watch; my chosen domains being, at all other
times, the shop, the bakehouse, and the stones round the spring of
crystal water at the back door (long since let down into the modern
sewer); and my chief companion, my aunt's dog, Towser, whom she had
taken pity on wh