facilities, and Burygold would have been as
active as ever. Now, her barges were lying
still and empty upon her inky canals; her
waggons were reposing quietly in her stables;
her workmen were standing in idle whispering
groups at the corners of her black and smoky
streets, and in growling mobs opposite to her
workhouse. Her capitalists were biting their
nails over melancholy balance-sheets in her
dingy counting-houses. They had been
practical men;—men who had not dreamed dreams,
but men who had acted them. It was a pity
they had failed: but their principle—extension
rather than soundness—led to ruin; and
their time had come.

Six months—twelve months—passed, and
Burygold, instead of "righting herself," as
Mr. Bristles, and also Mr. Flint, had
confidently predicted it would, only seemed to sink
more helplessly and irredeemably into the
mire. It became evident that something NEW
must be struck out, to give the Great Deadlock
and the Direct Burygold enterprises a lift in
the market;—to preserve the chance of Mr.
Bristles' statue being voted, and the prospect
of the parliamentary membership of Mr.
Flint. This something new, after much
deliberation, turned out to be nothing more
than a plan very familiar to both Messrs.
Brimstone and Treacle, and Messrs. Fiery,
Furness, and Company, the eminent contractors:
It was spontaneously discovered, one
morning, by Mr. Bristles and Mr. Flint, that
of whatever peculiar advantages their respective
railways could boast (and it was not
necessary—to quote a parenthesis from the
new prospectus—to enlarge upon what must
be self-evident to the meanest capacity),
they both languished for want of marine
attractions. They went through an agricultural
country, a grazing country, an historical
country, a coal country, and a manufacturing
country; but they commanded no seaport, no
coast town, and it was not surprising that
their dividends languished. A Direct Burygold
and Great Deadlock Branch to the
delightful and salubrious coast town of
Hookham-in-the-Marsh, was a public and politic
demand that was not to be resisted.

Hookham-in-the-Marsh was about fifty
miles across the country from Burygold; and,
until discovered by the railway surveyors, its
sands were almost strangers to the foot-prints
of civilised man. A flag-staff, a few huts,
two fishing smacks, a boat turned upside
down, a wide expanse of mud, sand, stones, and
sea-weed, composed Hookham-in-the-Marsh.
A little out of the mud and water, about two
miles inland, was the parent town;
sometimes called Great Hookham; sometimes,
from the almost imperceptible slope upward
from the coast, called Hookham-on-the-Hill.

Hookham-on-the-Hill had been a village
in the time of William the Conqueror, and a
village it yet remained in the middle of the
nineteenth century. Its few inhabitants were
unambitious and easy-going, passing much of
their time upon a bridge chewing straw,
and dropping stones into a small river that
ran down to the sea. Their staple manufacture
was a celebrated, but indigestible cheese,
which caused the town to have a faint smell,
as if suffering from defective sewerage; and
their ony pride was in a hard cannon-ball
kind of dumpling, which had been made at
the principal and only hotel—according to a
stringent proviso in the lease—
uninterruptedly, every day, for a period of two
hundred years. There was also a small ruin in
the neighbourhood;—the remains of Saint
Nettlerash's Abbey, looking very like a large
Gothic dust-bin; and, up a certain stable-
yard was a spring, dropping into a stone
basin from a rudely carved lion's head in the
wall. Whoever tasted the waters of this
spring, to the extent of half a pint, was
immediately confined to his bed with symptoms
of aggravated cholera, and excited unholy
hopes in the minds of expectant legatees.

Such were the chief features of Hookham-
on-the-Hill; which, added to the large
semicircular coast of mud, stones, sand, and
seaweed, that distinguished the port of Hookham-
in-the-Marsh, formed, in the opinion of Mr.
Bristles and Messrs. Brimstone, Treacle, and
Company, on the one hand, Mr. Flint and
Messrs. Fiery, Furness, and Company, on the
other, a more than usually favourable basis for
the extension of railway enterprise. A
deputation of influential local individuals from
Hookham-on-the-Hill, waited privately on
Mr. Mercator Flint (under the advice of
Messrs. Fiery, Furness, and Company),
and as good as told him that his election
for that ancient town might be
considered as secured, on the very day that the
proposed station was opened in the Great
Hookham High Street. Messrs. Brimstone,
Treacle, and Company went even further in
influencing Mr. Bristles; for, aided by two
faithful disciples of that gentleman, they
moved and carried at a full meeting of the
Direct Burygold Board: "That in consideration
of Mr. Bristles's talent and energy, his
undeviating attention to business details, and
his praiseworthy devotion to the best interests
of the Direct London and Burygold Railway,
a sum of one thousand pounds be set aside as
a testimonial to be presented to him in the
form of a full-length statue in stone, to be
erected upon a pedestal in the centre of the
great entrance-hall at the London terminus:
such stone statue to be executed by the
eminent sculptor, Mr. Atticus Mallett."

These movements had the desired effect.
The Great Deadlock Company took a long
lease of the stable-yard and spring, obtained
a highly scientific and incomprehensible
medical certificate of the beneficial saline
properties of the water, and built a Corinthian
pump-room. The Direct Burygold turned
its attention to the antiquarian history of
Saint Nettlerash's Abbey, and to looking-up
several natural advantages in the outskirts