192 ON THE TRACK OF THE MAIL-COACH 



a handful of letters, which could have been comfortably 

 carried in the captain's pocket. 



Not alone to Glasgow and Cork belong the glories 

 of deepening a shallow channel. Liverpool has also 

 successfullv confronted the natural obstacles which 

 threatened her anchorage, and while I saw, in the 

 fifties, the great bar, formed by the Burbo bank off 

 New Brighton, high and dry at low- water, there is 

 now, I believe, never less than twenty feet of water on 

 it, even at the lowest tides. 



But this is not all. For as long as I can remember 

 tugs have taken off mails and passengers to the 

 Transatlantic packets lying in the stream. Now all is 

 changed. On June 12, 1895, the great steamship 

 Germanic, of the White Star Line, came for the first 

 time alongside the famous landing-stage, and within 

 a quarter of an hour after the arrival of the special 

 train from Euston, was on her way down the Mersey 

 to New York. 



This was on Wednesday. At two-thirty p.m. on 

 Saturday, the 15th, the mighty Campania, of the 

 Cunard Line, bound, like the Germanic, with the mails 

 for New York, left her moorings in the Sloyne — the 

 same moorings, perhaps, at which, forty-four years 

 ago, I used to see the red funnels of the Europa, Asia, 

 Africa, and Arabia, and others of the line, resting 

 from their labours or preparing for fresh runs across 

 the Atlantic. The Campania came slowly over the 

 mile or two of water to the landing-stage — a tiny 

 steam- tug catching at her head to steady it, as she 



