Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/324

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as it may sound to the ears of our readers, we know well an ancient and venerable town, scarcely twenty miles distant from London, many of whose inhabitants had never seen a railway train or a steam engine in the latter half of this nineteenth century. Nor is this town an ordinary town; in former times it might well have challenged the name of a city; nearly nineteen hundred years ago it was known to the Roman occupiers of this island as Verulamium, but for the last fifteen centuries it has been re-christened St. Alban's, after the first British martyr, Alban, who suffered death just outside its walls in the persecution of the heathen emperor Diocletian. It was only in the summer of 1858 that a branch line of railway was opened from Watford to St. Alban's, thus bringing the venerable city within the reach of modern influences. So strange was the sight, that a resident assured us that for several weeks after the line was first opened the departure and arrival of each train was greeted by the astonished Verulamians with cheers and shouts of admiration, and that it was only gradually that the excitement subsided.

From this fact our readers will very justly infer that St. Alban's is not only an old town,