ng awful in the sky." {8}

across the Menai Straits into Anglesey and so to Holyhead. The air was
again thick, and to become thicker, with new adventures. Hardly a valley
in North or Central Wales but had its ardent advocates of connecting
lines. Within a short time newspaper columns were to be flooded with
prospectuses of all sorts of schemes. Parliamentary committee rooms
buzzed with forensic eloquence about the advantages and disadvantages of
this or that route. Expert witnesses swore this, that, or anything else,
as expert witnesses generally will, provided, that like the gentlemen who
question and cross-question them, they are sufficiently briefed. In vain
did the secluded Lake Poet protest:

"Is there no nook of English ground secure
From rash assault?"

The iron road was to come, and come it did, all conquering and, not so
unbeneficial, after all, in its rule.

Amidst this welter of proposals and counter-proposals there emerged,
sometime during 1852 a scheme, propounded by Mr. Bethell, of Westminster
for constructing a railway connecting the existing line at Shrewsbury
with Aberystwyth. It was to run by way of the Rea Valley, through
Minsterley, and to strike the Severn Valley again in the neighbourhood of
Montgomery, whence it was to continue through Newtown and Llanidloes.
This was quickly followed by another for a line from Oswestry to Newtown,
which was projected under Shrewsbury and Chester Railway auspices. To
the latter Mr. Bethell replied by transferring his scheme to the North
Western Company, whose engineers remodelled it. With a view to driving
any rival Montgomeryshire scheme out of the field, the proposed new line
was diverted from the Rea Valley to pass by way of Criggion and Welshpool
to Newtown, with a branch from Criggion to Oswestry, and between Newtown
and Aberystwyth it was altered to go by Machynlleth, instead of
Llanidloes.

This sort of strategy, however, only seemed to stimulate the men of
Montgomeryshire to fresh determination to show their independence, and in
this they had the adventitious aid of a very influential neighbour, Mr.
George Hammond Whalley.

[Picture: The late MR. G. H. WHALLEY, M.P., from a Portrait presented by
the citizens of Peterborough, and now hanging in Peterborough Museum]

Mr. Whalley was a very remarkable man. A native of Gloucester, according
to "Debrett," he was a lineal descendant of Edward Whalley (first cousin
to Oliver Cromwell