But when it is all sad and dun, life is a matter either of reaping and railing, and no one can reap unless he rails. These other concerns are merely sidings upon which we pause to allow the big trains of thought an open track. He who would reap must rail, for every life, by the nature of its freight, must follow the rails of its Destiny, and if perchance it jumps its rails it ends in railings. This journal is a Railway Magazine, but the railway itself is a magazine of forces which for a century has supplied the barrage behind which man has advanced and routed the defences of undisciplined Nature. When I speed along the twin steels, sunk deep in upholstered tranquility, and secure in the knowledge that I am being carefully handed, as it were, from one of the army of railway zealots to another, I see, not the fat lush lands that swing athwart my vision, not the swelling hills dappled with moving fleeces, nor yet the gold-dusted sheets of grain; I see, as on a photographic film which has been double-exposed, a background of tangled writhing forest, of trackless wilderness, of sluggishly moving swamp, and the primeval disorder of untamed Nature. Then the smooth pulsations of the great black shining steed that flings the scenery past my window awakens me to a sense of his magic, and the only way I can express my gratitude is to whisper “good old horse.”