The subject of freight on the rails could, of course, be made as heavy as the last Christmas pudding from which we are all speeding at a steady 24-hour a day pace (with one hour cut off for Sidey time); or it could be made as light as a comic opera, or the traffic on some of our branch lines. It deserves neither treatment, however, for it is a matter both of great moment to the community and also has a romance that is all its own.

When you hear the rumbling roar of a freight train as it tears across a detonating viaduct in the small hours of a murky night, with what Harold Munro calls the “tittle-tattle of a tame tatoon,” and what non-poetic plain people like ourselves call the sound of half-a-thousand wheels clicking their way along the iron road—when, I say, that roar grows to a menacing intensity, every practical fellow is inclined to wonder what it's all about; and that is just what I shall endeavour to tell you to-night.