150 EDWAED PEASE. CHAP. IX. 



eminently qualified to undertake what appeared to 

 many the desperate enterprise of obtaining an Act of 

 Parliament to construct a railway through a rather 

 unpromising district. One who knew him in 1818 

 said, "he was a man who could see a hundred years 

 ahead." When the writer last saw him, in the autumn 

 of 1854, Mr. Pease was in his eighty-eighth year; yet 

 he still possessed the hopefulness and mental vigour of 

 a man in his prime. Hale and hearty, and full of remi- 

 niscences of the past, he continued to take an active 

 interest in all measures calculated to render the lives of 

 men happier and better. Still sound in health, his eye 

 had not lost its brilliancy, nor his cheek its colour ; and 

 there was an elasticity in his step which younger men 

 might have envied. 1 



In getting up a company for the purpose of surveying 

 and forming a railway, Mr. Pease had great difficulties 

 to encounter. The people of the neighbourhood spoke 

 of it as a ridiculous undertaking, and predicted that 

 it would be the ruin of all who had to do with it. 

 Even those who were most interested in the opening 

 out of new markets for the vend of their coal, were 

 indifferent, if not actually hostile. The Stockton mer- 

 chants and shipowners, whom the formation of a 

 railway was calculated so greatly to benefit, gave the 

 project no support ; and not twenty shares were sub- 

 scribed for in the whole town. Mr. Pease nevertheless 

 persevered with the formation of a company ; and he 

 ; induced many of his friends and relations to subscribe 

 for shares. The Eichardsons and Backhouses, members, 

 like himself, of the Society of Friends, influenced by his 

 persuasion, united themselves with him ; and so many 

 of the same denomination (having great confidence in 

 those influential Darlington names) followed their 

 example and subscribed for shares, that the railway sub- 



W l Mr. Pease died at Darlington, on the 31st of July, 1858, aged ninety-two. 



