eighty-pounder when it beats in a French ship's
bulwarks could scarcely hit harder than this.

Open fly the doors, some dozen white-faced
men sprang through the windows like harlequins
in a practising class, out poured the frightened
people, lately so red and jolly; but a minute
ago flirting, dogmatising, sneering, scandalising,
frowning, disputing, now all full of one thought
of terror, all become, in that one terrible
moment, as brothers and sisters: so levelling is
misfortune. We were lately in a good ship, all
sail set, flags flying, and no danger aft or fore or
on the lee. Suddenly we had struck on a reef;
we were leaking—we were sinking—we were
a total wreck.  Heaven knew only what still was
left for us. It might be but a moment to
live for some of us.  Perhaps already bleeding
men were groaning their last under that pile of
ruin where the red flame rose from.

The guards, white as wood ashes, were
running about, flags in hand, like the buglemen
of a scattered regiment. Far away to the
left, at the end where the charge had been,
the engine, a hill of broken metal, was roaring
like a lion taken in the toils, and sending up
waving pillars of flames, as if its woodwork had
taken fire, and spreading to the fragments of
the next carriage.

As for the passengers embracing, or silent in
staggered groups, they were unanimously white in
the face. One strong-faced man was being helped
from a carriage, his face seeming to ooze everywhere
with blood. A lady was carried away, cut,
bruised, and nearly insensible, to the little shed
of a station.  A young farmer, seated on his
striped carpet-bag, was covering his face with
his hands to squeeze out a jarring headache,
produced by his being driven against a man opposite.
Others stunned, shaken, and bruised, were
consoling, or being consoled, or running to see what
damage had been done to the train, and what
danger still existed.  There were messengers
racing to Farnborough, three miles off, to
telegraph to London for help; and there were
guards and porters running up and down the
line to put up danger signals, and keep trains
nearly due from heaping more ruin on us.

My presentiment had then come true.

My first business on seeing no help was
needed was to shut up my plaid and books, and
run to the ruin of the engine and the actual
spot of the smash.  I found that we had driven,
at almost express speed, into a ponderous goods
train, laden with timber and blocks of asphalte,
massive and unyielding as stone. This we had
partly driven back and stove in, pounding the
guard carriage behind to rags and pulp. On
this bulwark our own engine had beaten itself
to pieces, by a series of leaps, jolts, and charges:
it lay a wreck, the funnel torn to pieces
and scattered about the platform, the iron
plates jammed in, as if they were deal
wainscoting; the buffers broken to morsels; the giant
wheels dismounted and buried in the heart; the
whole crushed and powerless as a silenced battery.

Beyond, and some yards further, lay the
timber-truck, its roof torn off, and, at a distance,
the planks splintered; as for the guard-carriage,
it was torn to pieces as a bandbox might be
when a drunken man has stamped on it and trod
it to bits.  It lay in pulpy shreds and fragments
as of rotten wood, without shape and void, and,
out of the pounded mass—reduced as in a pestle
and mortar, in a desperate attempt of some
starving apothecary to make deal soup—we
licked a torn rag with a fragment of bread-
and-cheese, and two jammed and squeezed red
looks of by-laws, which looked as if they had
been disinterred at Pompeii.

But the torn planks and broken iron, and
snapped-off wheels and rods, were as nothing to
us—though they rose like the ruins of a cottage
destroyed by a hurricane on the rails—when
the fire of the engine began roaring up in
a smoky red and yellow pyramid, with a bellow
and troubled roar as if howling for victims.
There, busy amid the ruins, the scared fireman
and black-faced stoker were shovelling in gravel
to prevent the boiler bursting or the flame
spreading. Before the great leaping out
violence we all fell back like the Babylonians in
the old prints when the furnace doors were
opened to swallow up the children of Israel, and
the furnace was "heated seven times hotter than
it was wont to be heated;" we were all then, I
suppose, in that unconscious state of excitement,
that if the earth had suddenly opened and
swallowed as all up, train, wreck, passengers and all,
we should hardly have made a remark.

Having once seen the pile of debris,
carriage roofs, iron bars, planks, and wheels,
I employed myself, in accordance with old
habits, in beating slowly over the whole
scene of the disaster, determined by graphic
observations, fresh as I was to such scenes,
to realise fully the horror and danger of
such accidents.  As I walked along the line of
carriages, here and there crushed or sprung,
the first thing I stepped on was a round bar of
iron or steel, thicker than my wrist when my two
coats are on; it had been, I imagine, part of the
under work of the engine, and was snapped short
in two. The next thing I picked up was a jagged
piece of the funnel, still black and smoking; it
now stands on my mantelpiece a lively
record of my escape.  I also found and handled a
huge screw made of iron, bound with brass,
which, perhaps, had formed the inner socket of
one of the buffers. It was cleft in two, as a sharp
knife would chop an apple at one stroke.

Under the carriages, blocks of iron, like the
fastenings of sleepers, were strewn for thirty or
forty yards; and, in one of the carriages ten or
twelve from the engine, the floor planks were
torn up in great jags, protruding three or four
feet, showing beneath them (between them and
the ground) broken wood, iron hooping, and huge
gutta-percha circular slabs—probably breaks or
springs—torn violently in two.  On one seat
lay a crumpled Times, with holes in it; and
on another a tumbled shawl, the fringe of which
was entangled in the teeth of the splintered and
started planks. When I remembered an old
tradition about railway accidents, recommending