When the period for booking up, for making the first instalments, arrived, the Spanish shareholders were found somewhat wanting: they repudiated; for in the Peninsula it has long been easier to promise than to pay. Again, on the only line which seems likely to be carried out at present, that of Madrid to Aranjuez, the first step taken by them was to dismiss all English engineers and _navvies_, on the plea of encouraging native talent and industry rather than the foreigner. Many of the English home proceedings would border on the ridiculous, were not the laugh of some speculators rather on the wrong side. The City capitalists certainly have our pity, and if their plethora of wealth required the relief of bleeding, it could not be better performed than by a Spanish _Sangrado_. How different some of the windings-up, the final reports, to the magnificent beginnings and grandiloquent prospectuses put forth as baits for John Bull, who hoped to be tossed at once, or elevated, from haberdashery to a throne, by being offered a “potentiality of getting rich beyond the dreams of avarice!” Thus, to clench assertion by example, the London directors of the Royal Valencia Company made known by an advertisement only last July, that they merely required 240,000,000 reals to connect the seaport of Valencia--where there is none--to the capital Madrid, with 800,000 inhabitants,--there not being 200,000. One brief passage alone seemed ominous in the lucid array of prospective profit--“The line has not yet been minutely surveyed;” this might have suggested to the noble Marquis whose attractive name heads the provisional committee list, the difficulty of Sterne’s traveller, of whom, when observing how much better things were managed on the Continent than in England, the question was asked, “Have you, sir, ever been there?” [Sidenote: LONDON RAILROAD MEETINGS.]