i|o HIGHWAYS AND HORSES. 



has been removed, they shiver and stand abashed 

 as if overcome with a sense of indehcacy. They 

 stretch their necks (astonished that they can stretch 

 them) this way and that, and poke their moist cokl 

 noses into stray substances with a puzzled air. Their 

 time is their own ; but what on earth, they say to 

 themselves, as they lay their long, not very sagacious, 

 heads together, are they to do with it ? Their 

 occupation is drawing, and that gone, they have no 

 other accomplishments. They see their fellow- 

 creatures rolling on the earth with their four legs in 

 the air, a proceeding which strikes them as ridiculous 

 without being amusing. Such high spirits are in- 

 explicable to them ; they are old stagers, and when 

 they are off the stage they lag superfluous." 



It is a singular thing that so many of the old 

 coaches should have been called the "Telegraph," 

 as it was not till the 25th of July, 1837, that the first 

 experiments were made with the electric telegraph, 

 between Euston Square and Camden Town stations ; 

 the London and North-Western Railway Company 

 having sanctioned the laying down of wires between 

 those places, immediately upon the taking out of the 

 patent by Messrs. Wheatstone and Cook. Besides 

 these two operators, Mr. Fox and Mr. R. Stephenson 

 were present to witness the infant triumphs of this 

 wonderful invention. 



Wheatstone, who was knighted by the Queen in 

 1868, had long been a Professor of Natural and 

 Experimental Philosophy at King's College, and had 

 been associated with Cook, who was also knighted on 

 November nth, 1869, in the perfecting of electric 

 telegraphic apparatus ; although the late Professor 

 Morse, of the United States, was regarded by some 



