One fine summer's day we stood upon a little bridge thrown over the deep cutting of a newly constructed railway. It was an open country around us, a common English landscape--fields with their hedgerows, and their thin elm-trees stripped of their branches, with here and there a slight undulation of the soil, giving relief to, or partially concealing, the red and white cottage or the red-tiled barn. We were looking, however, into the deep cutting beneath us. Here the iron rails glistened in the sun, and still, as the eye pursued their track, four threads of glittering steel ran their parallel course, but apparently approximating in the far perspective, till they were lost by mere failure of the power of vision to follow them: the road itself was straight as an arrow. On the steep banks, fresh from the spade and pick-axe, not a shrub was seen, not a blade of grass. On the road itself there was nothing but clods of earth, or loose gravel, which lay in heaps by the side of the rails, or in hollows between them: it was enough that the iron bars lay there clear of all obstruction. No human foot, no foot of man or of beast, was ever intended to tread that road. It was for the engine only. From time to time the shrill whistle is heard--the train, upon its hundred iron wheels, shoots through the little bridge, and rolls like thunder along these level grooves. It is soon out of sight, and the country is not only again calm and solitary, but appears for the moment to be utterly abandoned and deserted. It has its old life, however, in it still. Well, as we were standing thus upon the little bridge, in the open country, and looking down into this deep ravine of the engineer's making, we noticed, fluttering beneath us, a yellow butterfly, sometimes beating its wings against the barren sides, and sometimes perching on the glistering rails themselves. Clearly, most preposterously out of place was this same beautiful insect. What had it to do there? What food, what fragrance, what shelter could it find? Or who was to see and to admire? There was not a shrub, nor an herb, nor a flower, nor a playmate of any description. It is manifest, most beautiful butterfly, that you cannot live here. From these new highways of ours, from these iron thoroughfares, you must certainly depart. But it follows not that you must depart the world altogether. In yonder hollow at a distance there is a cottage, surrounded by its trees and its flowers, and there are little children whom you may sport with, and tease, and delight, taking care they do not catch you napping. There is still _garden-ground_ in the world for you, and such as you. Sometimes, when we have seen pretty little gilded volumes of song and poetry lying about in the great highways of our industrial world, we have recalled this scene to mind. There is garden-ground left for them also, and many a private haunt, solitary or domestic, where they will be welcome.