to gallop the next stage?  Do you remember Sir Somebody, the coachman of the Age, who took our half-crown so affably?  It was only yesterday; but what a gulf between now and then!  Then was the old world.  Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armor, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth—­all these belong to the old period.  I will concede a halt in the midst of it, and allow that gunpowder and printing tended to modernize the world.  But your railroad starts the new era, and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one.  We are of the time of chivalry as well as the Black Prince or Sir Walter Manny.  We are of the age of steam.  We have stepped out of the old world on to “Brunel’s” vast deck, and across the waters ingens patet tellus.  Towards what new continent are we wending? to what new laws, new manners, new politics, vast new expanses of liberties unknown as yet, or only surmised?  I used to know a man who had invented a flying-machine.  “Sir,” he would say, “give me but five hundred pounds, and I will make it.  It is so simple of construction that I tremble daily lest some other person should light upon and patent my discovery.”  Perhaps faith was wanting; perhaps the five hundred pounds.  He is dead, and somebody else must make the flying-machine.  But that will only be a step forward on the journey already begun since we quitted the old world.  There it lies on the other side of yonder embankments.  You young folks have never seen it; and Waterloo is to you no more than Agincourt, and George IV. than Sardanapalus.  We elderly people have lived in that praerailroad world, which has passed into limbo and vanished from under us.  I tell you it was firm under our feet once, and not long ago.  They have raised those railroad embankments up, and shut off the old world that was behind them.  Climb up that bank on which the irons are laid, and look to the other side—­it is gone.  There is no other side.  Try and catch yesterday.  Where is it?  Here is a Times newspaper, dated Monday 26th, and this is Tuesday 27th.  Suppose you deny there was such a day as yesterday?

We who lived before railways, and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.  The children will gather round and say to us patriarchs, “Tell us, grandpapa, about the old world.”  And we shall mumble our old stories; and we shall drop off one by one; and there will be fewer and fewer of us, and these very old and feeble.  There will be but ten praerailroadites left:  then three then two—­then one—­then 0!  If the hippopotamus had the least sensibility (of which I cannot trace any signs either in his hide or his face), I think he would go down to the bottom of his tank, and never come up again.  Does he not see that he belongs to bygone ages, and that his great hulking barrel of a body is out of place in these times?  What has he in common with the brisk