ourse of the
construction of this tunnel. On one occasion a man who had been working
in it was being hauled up one of the shafts, when his coat caught in an
angular crevice of the partition, that separated the pumps from the
passage for the men, and became so firmly jammed that he was compelled
to let go the rope, and was left there dangling in the air, about a
hundred feet from the bottom, until his horrified comrades went down and
rescued him by cutting away the piece of his coat. This piece of cloth
was long preserved in the engineer's office as a memorial of the event!
On another occasion some men were at work on a platform, half-way down
the shaft, executing some repairs, when a huge navvy, named Jack
Pierson, fell from the surface, went right through the platform, as if
it had been made of paper, and fell to the bottom. Fortunately there
was water to receive him there, else he had been killed on the spot.
The men, whom of course he had narrowly missed in his fall, began to
shout for a rope to those above, and they hallooed their advice down the
shaft in reply. In the midst of the confusion Jack Pierson himself
calmly advised them to make less noise and pull him out, which they very
soon did, and the poor man was carried home and put to bed. He lay
there for many weeks unable to move, but ultimately recovered.

What we have said of the Kilsby tunnel gives a slight glimpse of some of
the expenses, difficulties, and dangers that occasionally attend the
construction of a railway.

Of course these difficulties and expenses vary according to the nature
of the ground. In some places the gradients are slight, bridges few,
and cuttings, etcetera, insignificant; but in other places the reverse
is emphatically the case, and costly laborious works have to be
undertaken.

One such work, which occurred at the very opening of our railway system
in 1828, was the bridging of the Chat Moss, on the Liverpool and
Manchester line. George Stephenson, the constructer of the "Rocket,"
was also the hero of the Chat Moss. This moss was a great swamp or bog,
four miles in extent, which was so soft that it could not be walked on
with safety, and in some places an iron rod laid on the surface would
sink by its own weight. Like many other difficulties in this world, the
solidification of the Chat Moss was said to be impossible, but the great
engineer scarce admitted the propriety of allowing the word "impossible"
to cumber our dict