224 EDITOR. 



tion, for example, Chalmers was bringing all the energies 

 of his genius to solve the grave economical problems 

 with whose practical solution the Free Church would 

 require to grapple. The religious mind of Scotland, 

 however, was at the moment deeply agitated by what 

 may be called the Railway phase of the Sabbath ques- 

 tion. Hugh Miller's enthusiasm for the Sabbath was as 

 great as his enthusiasm for the Church, and he appre- 

 hended national disaster on a large scale as the ultimate re- 

 sult of the running of railway trains on Sunday. Accord- ' 

 ingly, on the 4th March, 1843, there appeared in the 

 Witness a couple of columns from his pen, headed, 

 ' A Vision of the Railroad,' in which the possibilities of 

 the future were delineated in appalling hues. ' Writing 

 a Vision of the Railroad,' growled Chalmers, ' when we 

 want money ! ' The Vision is so characteristic, and, as a 

 piece of literary workmanship, so striking, that I insert 

 it here. The ' Mr McNeill,' who somewhat spectrally -ap- 

 pears amid the imagery of the piece, can be understood to 

 have been some lawyer of the period whose opinions on the 

 first day of the week seemed to Miller to be latitudinarian. 



A VISION OF THE RAILROAD. 



, Isle of Skye. 



* * * I know not when this may reach you. We are much shut 

 out from the world at this dead season of the year, especially in those 

 wilder solitudes of the island that extend their long slopes of moor to 

 the west. The vast Atlantic spreads out before us, blackened by 

 tempest, a solitary waste, unenlivened by a single sail, and fenced off 

 from the land by an impassable line of breakers. Even from the ele- 

 vation where I now write, for my little cottage stands high on the 

 hill-side, I can hear the measured boom of the waves, swelling like 

 the roar of distant artillery, above the melancholy meanings of the 

 wind among the nearer crags, and the hoarser dash of the stream in the 

 hollow below. We are in a state of siege ; the isle is beleaguered on 

 its rugged line of western coast, and all communication with man in that 

 quarter cut off; while in the opposite direction the broken arid precari- 

 ous footways that wind across the hills to our more accessible eastern 



