Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/18

4 hotel, and awake in the early morning to find himself in Glasgow or Edinburgh, or even further north. Merchants are able to be in frequent personal communication with their correspondents in the most distant towns; young folks, exiled from their homes in pursuit of their various careers, are enabled to spend even the shortest holiday in the family circle; letters posted in the evening are read at breakfast tables hundreds of miles distant the following morning; coals and every necessity of life are cheapened to the consumer, and every branch of business has been enormously stimulated and developed by the facilities thus brought to bear upon it; and, in fact, the speed and certainty with which the inland and import and export trade of the country is carried on are nothing less than astonishing. Goods are punctually collected, carried hundreds of miles between all the most important towns in England, and delivered to their consignees within the day of twenty-four hours, and even between England and places in Scotland, and the seaport towns of Ireland, within forty-eight hours. The Yorkshire manufacturer who attends the London wool sales today can have the wool he purchases in his warehouse to-morrow. The Lancashire cotton spinner will buy cotton in the Liverpool market one day, and it will probably be in actual consumption in his mill the next. Dead meat from Scotland and from abroad, poultry, butter and eggs from Ireland, vegetables, fruit, and all perishable goods of the kind, are despatched by the growers with the narrowest possible margin of time to catch a particular market; and all this is done with the utmost certainty and punctuality, making allowance, of course, for trifling miscarriages, which will occur in