head of his injured mate.

"Mayhap I _have_ lost my life, young man," replied the other sharply.
"Internal injuries from accidents often prove fatal, and don't always
show at first. I've had a severe shake."

Here the sour-faced man shook himself slightly, partly to illustrate and
partly to prove his point.

"You're quite right, sur," remarked an Irishman, who had a bandage tied
round his head, but who did not appear to be much, if at all, the worse
of the accident. "It's a disgrace intirely that the railways should be
allowed to trait us in this fashion. If they'd only go to the trouble
an' expense of havin' proper signals on lines, there would be nothing o'
this kind. And if Government would make a law to have an arm-chair
fitted up in front of every locomotive and a director made to travel
with sich train, we'd hear of fewer accidents. But it's meself 'll come
down on 'em for heavy damages for this."

He pointed to his bandaged head, and nodded with a significant glance at
the company.

A gentleman in a blue travelling-cap, who had hitherto said nothing, and
who turned out to have received severer injuries than any other
passenger, here looked up impatiently, and said--

"It appears to me that there is a great deal of unjust and foolish talk
against railway companies, as if they, any more than other companies,
could avoid accidents. The system of signalling on a great part of this
line is the best that has been discovered up to this date, and it is
being applied to the whole line as fast as circumstances will warrant;
but you can't expect to attain perfection in a day. What would you
have? How can you expect to travel at the rate you do, and yet be as
safe as if you were in one of the old mail-coaches?"

"Right, sir; you're right," cried John Marrot energetically, raising
himself a little from the bench on which he lay, "right in sayin' we
shouldn't ought to expect parfection, but wrong in supposin' the old
mail-coaches was safer. W'y, railways is safer. They won't stand no
comparison. Here 'ave I bin drivin' on this 'ere line for the last
eight year an' only to come to grief three times, an' killed no more
than two people. There ain't a old coach goin', or gone, as could say
as much. An' w'en you come to consider that in them eight years I've
bin goin' more than two-thirds o' the time at an average o' forty mile
an hour--off an' on--all night a'most as well as all day, an' run
thousands and tho