pable and ridiculous delusion. One of the members of the
committee pressed Stephenson very hard with questions. "Suppose," he
said, "a cow were to get upon the line, and the engine were to come
into collision with it; wouldn't that be very awkward, now?" George
looked up at him with a merry twinkle of the eye, and answered in his
broad North Country dialect, "Oo, ay, very awkward for the COO."

In spite of all Stephenson's earnestness and mother wit, however,
Parliament refused to pass the bill (in 1825), and for the moment the
engineer's vexation was bitter to behold. He and his friends plucked
up heart, however; they were fighting the winning battle against
prejudice and obstruction, and they were sure to conquer in the long
run. The line was resurveyed by other engineers; the lands of the
hostile owners were avoided; the causes of offence were dexterously
smoothed down; and after another hard fight, in 1826, the bill
authorizing the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester railway
was finally passed. The board at once appointed Stephenson engineer
for constructing the line, at a salary of 1000 pounds a year. George
might now fairly consider himself entitled to the honours of an Esquire.

The line was a difficult one to construct; but George Stephenson set
about it with the skill and knowledge acquired during many years of
slow experience; and he performed it with distinguished success. He
was now forty-four; and he had had more to do with the laying down of
rails than any other man then living. The great difficulty of the
Liverpool and Manchester line lay in the fact that it had to traverse a
vast shaking bog or morass, Chat Moss, which the best engineers had
emphatically declared it would be impossible to cross. George
Stephenson, however, had a plan for making the impossible possible. He
simply floated his line on a broad bottom, like a ship, on the top of
the quaking quagmire; and proceeded to lay down his rails on this
seemingly fragile support without further scruple. It answered
admirably, and still answers to the present day. The other works on
the railway, especially the cuttings, were such as might well have
appalled the boldest heart in those experimental ages of railway
enterprise. It is easy enough for us now to undertake tunnelling great
hills or filling up wide valleys with long ranges of viaduct, because
the thing has been done so often, and the prospect of earning a fair
return on t