river."
"What do you say to the light of the sun?" "How can that be?" asked the
doctor. "It is nothing else," said the engineer, "it is light bottled up
in the earth for tens of thousands of years,--light, absorbed by plants
and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon during the
process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form,--and now,
after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that
latent light is again brought forth and liberated, made to work as in
that locomotive, for great human purposes."

During the same visit, Mr. Stephenson, one evening repeated his
experiment with blood drawn from the finger, submitting it to the
microscope in order to show the curious circulation of the globules. He
set the example by pricking his own thumb; and the other guests, by
turns, in like manner, gave up a small portion of their blood for the
purpose of ascertaining the comparative livelinesss of their circulation.
When Sir Robert Peel's turn came, Mr. Stephenson said he was curious to
know "how the blood globules of a great politician would conduct
themselves." Sir Robert held forth his finger for the purpose of being
pricked; but once, and again, he sensitively shrunk back, and at length
the experiment, so far as he was concerned, was abandoned. Sir Robert
Peel's sensitiveness to pain was extreme, and yet he was destined, a few
years after, to die a death of the most distressing agony.

In 1847, the year before his death, Mr. Stephenson was again invited to
join a distinguished party at Drayton Manor, and to assist in the
ceremony of formally opening the Trent Valley Railway, which had been
originally designed and laid out by himself many years before. The first
sod of the railway had been cut by the Prime Minister, in November, 1845,
during the time when Mr. Stephenson was abroad on the business of the
Spanish railway. The formal opening took place on the 26th June, 1847,
the line having thus been constructed in less than two years.

What a change had come over the spirit of the landed gentry since the
time when George Stephenson had first projected a railway through that
district! Then they were up in arms against him, characterising him as
the devastator and spoiler of their estates; now he was hailed as one of
the greatest benefactors of the age. Sir Robert Peel, the chief
political personage in England, welcomed him as a guest and friend, and
spoke of him as the