424 THE COACHING AGE. 



speed and monopoly of travelling. Any person 

 venturing to express such an opinion would, I should 

 imagine, have been deemed a fitting inmate for some 

 similar abode to Colney Hatch ; and as much atten- 

 tion would have been accorded to the opinion as 

 to anyone who might now predict that the present 

 railways will some day be entirely superseded by 

 balloon-travelling. 



In Mother Shipton's prophecies I believe something 

 is shadowed forth as to railway-travelling ; but I 

 don't think her prophetic powers extended in any 

 way to balloons, or that she even got so far as to 

 prophesy the rate at which the fast day-coaches 

 would travel. 



In nothing, perhaps, has a greater revolution taken 

 place during the last fifty years than in travelling. 

 In 1835 there was not a railway out of London ; and 

 perhaps the Stockton and Darlington Eailway, which 

 was opened in the latter part of the year 1825, 

 may be looked upon as the first commencement of 

 railway- travelling, although in a very modified 

 form compared with that of some thirty years later. 

 It was not a very gigantic undertaking, being only 

 a single line twenty-five miles long ; but the great 

 achievement, of course, was the propelling the train 

 by steam-^George Stephenson, the great engineer, 

 having constructed the engine, and being the driver 



