This encounter took the form of what may
be termed the absorption of villages.

On each side of any main line of railway,
will be found a number of small places
boasting a church, a single street, a post-office,
and a population of about two hundred
feeble villagers. These villages may be five
miles, or ten miles distant from the line the
railway may take; but there they will be, as
sure as rivers or Roman roads. Now, the Direct
Burygold and the Great Deadlock lines, both
going to Burygold, ran nearly parallel, at
about twenty miles distance from each other
all the way; the villages lying between them.
Who made the first step towards absorbing a
village,—whether Mr. Jupiter Bristles, aided
by Messrs. Brimstone, Treacle, and Company,
or Mr. Mercator Flint, assisted by Messrs.
Fiery, Furness, and Company,—it is impossible
to say; but there was the fact, that both lines
always reached one of these favoured outlying
spots about the same time. The effect of so
much costly branch communication was to
impoverish the main lines, without developing
the small resources of the hopelessly stagnant
places.

When a village was annexed, the three
inhabitants, who went once a week to London,
were much obliged to the two eminent chairmen
for their kind attention and annexation.
Sometimes a single passenger of not very
powerful intellect, was rendered so
undecided by the equal advantages of the
time-tables and fares of the two rival railroads,
that he sank down in a helpless condition,
unable to choose either.

Not content with the almost simultaneous
absorption of humble villages, the antagonistic
feeling of the two great railway chairmen
showed itself in no less a struggle than a
fight for the sole traffic to and from Burygold.
Fares were gradually reduced, day
after day, and manifestos covered the walls
of their respective railways, signed Jupiter
Bristles, and Mercator Flint. The public
looked on with wonder and delight at so
much directorial spirit; and the time came
when the two hundred miles to Burygold and
back could be travelled over for the absurd
price of eighteen-pence. Strange people came
out of metropolitan hiding-places—people who
had never heard of Burygold before treating
themselves, first to eighteenpenny worth of the
Jupiter Bristles' novelty and instruction, and
then to eighteenpennyworth from Mr.
Mercator Flint. In return, uncouth strangers
from Burygold wandered about the fashionable
streets of the metropolis, dressed in
an unknown garb, and speaking an unknown
tongue. Engine-drivers and guards of the
eighteenpenny trains were nothing more than
men, and conducted their charges with a
trifle less caution than usual, when they
thought of the absurdity of such minimised
fares. The result was that, once or twice, they
ran off the line, or into coal-trucks, and both
Mr. Jupiter Bristles and Mr. Mercator Flint
discovered, to the cost of their respective
companies, that eighteenpenny passengers knew
more about Lord Campbell's Compensation
Act, and the value of a bruised head, or a
broken limb, than aristocratic and regular
travellers.

How long this gigantic struggle, as Mr.
Bristles loved to term it, would have lasted,
it is impossible to say, if it had not been
abruptly brought to a close by the commercial
collapse of the important town of Burygold.
This produced something like a truce between
the two great chairmen; a reasonable tariff
of fares was again resorted to; and the
warriors rested, for the present, upon their
laurels and their losses.

Burygold had over-traded itself. It had been
a Burygold boast that a retail trader could
not be found within its precincts: everybody
was so extremely wholesale that every form
of currency was too restricted for Burygold's
vast operations. Capital could not be made
fast enough. It was time for Burygold to
put her shoulder to the wheel, and re-model
the whole financial system of the country;
for, its productions had been shipped to
every part of the globe, but it had not been
paid for them.

It was a sad thing to see so much energy, so
much smoke, so many factory chimneys utterly
thrown away. The town looked highly
practical. In fact what was it, if it was not
practical? It had no beauty to recommend it; it
did not look like a land of dreams. Mention
Bagdad or Constantinople at Burygold, and
everybody laughed. They knew exactly what
those places meant;—oriental indolence,
oriental superstition, oriental weakness of
mind and body, oriental indifference to gas,
main-sewers, water-companies, and railroads.
But Burygold was the type of Anglo-Saxon
energy; and its mission was to build iron
bridges for insolvent States; to construct
docks for countries that could not pay for
them; to supply foreign armies with swords
and fire-arms in exchange for drafts upon
tottering treasuries; to tunnel foreign
mountains, and to drain foreign bogs, with a
very misty prospect of remuneration; and
even to take its share in the cost and
anxiety of conducting a gigantic war for
those oriental dreamers, who were, too indolent
and incapable to conduct it themselves.
This was the practical mission which Burygold
had claimed for itself; and, while straining
undoubted powers to fulfil it to the
utmost, it was in danger of perishing almost
hopelessly in the attempt. Its chimneys
towered upward as they did before, but
with no crown of smoky glory round their
lofty heads. Its broken-down contractors
wandered listlessly through the mazes of
their silent and motionless machinery, cursing
the stillness produced by an arbitrary law
that limited the issue of paper-money, by
fixing the convertibility of the bank-note. A
little more time, and a few more banking