Poor Macadam! his honoured dust will soon be forgotten! In cities it is buried, or soon will be, in wood; and few of the millions who glide and slide over the wooden pavement, will think of the "Colossus of Roads," whose dust it covers like a coffin. Our course is no longer "o'er hills and dales, through woods and vales," which the many-handed Macadam made smooth and easy. Our carriage, placed like the toy of a child, goes without horses. The beautiful country--the cheerful "public," with its porch, its honeysuckle and roses--the sign which bade the "weary traveller rest" on the seat beneath the spreading elm;--these are no more!--This is the iron age--fire and steam are as the breath of our nostrils--we speak by the flash of lightning--we have given life to emptiness, and fly upon the wings of a vacuum--our path is through the blasted rock, the cold dark dreary tunnel--through cheerless banks, which shut us from the world like a living grave--on--on--on--we speed! The dying must die! The burning must burn! There is no appeal--no tarrying by the way. Like the whirlwind we are hurried to our end. The screech of women in despair is drowned by the clash, the din, the screech of the "blatant beast," the mad monster which man has laid his finger on, and tamed to his uses. This is all very fine, and, doubtless, _il faut marcher avec son siècle_, if we do not wish to be left behind in the race that is before us. Doubtless, too, our children, like calves born by the side of a railroad, will look on these things as a matter of course, and let them pass with high-bred indifference. And if, as most assuredly will be the case, some of these children should become mothers in due course of time, we can fancy them so philosophized by force of habit, so inured to the wholesale smashing and crashing of the human form divine, that, should a door fly open and let an infant drop, the mama will sit quiet till the next station cries Halt! and then merely request that a man and basket be despatched to pick up the pieces left some seven miles off![15] "_Chi lo sa!_" as the Neapolitans say in cases of extreme doubt and difficulty; "_chi lo sa_," say I; and having been born before the earth was swaddled up in iron, or the sea danced over by iron ships, I confess a sneaking fondness for the highways, and byways, and old ways of old England; and, when not pressed for time, I delight in honouring the remains of poor old Macadam.