Should he do this from the railway station he will have to face a mile or so of "long unlovely street" to begin with. For when railroads were first made--(the Great Eastern line from London to Cambridge being constructed in 1845)--they were regarded with extreme suspicion and dislike by the authorities of both Universities. The noise of the trains, it was declared, would be fatal to their studies; the facility of running up to London would hopelessly demoralise their undergraduates; bad characters from the metropolis would come down in shoals to prey upon them. Thus both Oxford and Cambridge strenuously opposed any near approach of this new-fangled abomination to their hallowed precincts. Oxford actually succeeded in keeping the main line of the Great Western as far off from it as Didcot, ten miles away, whence it did not penetrate to the city itself till a considerably later date, when prejudice had been overcome by the patent advantages of the new locomotion, and a station hard by was welcomed. At Oxford, therefore, no such distance divides the railway and the Colleges as at Cambridge, where from the first the station stood in its present place. This, at the date of its construction, was far beyond even the outermost buildings of the town, with which it is connected by the old Roman road, the main artery of Cambridge, running straight, as Roman roads do run, for miles on either side to the "Great Bridge." To antiquarians this road is known as the Via Devana, because its objective is supposed to have been the old Roman city of Deva (Chester); during its passage through Cambridge it has no fewer than seven official designations, to the frequent discomfiture of strangers. Where it conducts the visitor townwards from the railway station it presents, as we have said, a somewhat dreary vista; dignified only by the beautifully proportioned spire of the Roman Catholic Church, built in 1885. The erection of this edifice was due to the generosity of a single benefactor, Mrs. Lyne-Stephens, a French lady, who, early in the reign of Queen Victoria, won fame and fortune as the most renowned ballet dancer of the London stage. The Church is popularly called, in Cambridge, a Cathedral; but this is a misnomer, for the Bishop's See is not here but at Northampton. The cross-roads at which the church is placed rejoice in the inane designation of Hyde Park Corner. The best approach to Cambridge is by the westward road of the four, which leads into the London Road (or Trumpington Road, as it is here called), that umbrageous avenue of leafage spoken of in our opening sentences. Keeping along this towards the town, we find ourselves confronted with one of the prettiest and most uncommon amongst the minor attractions of Cambridge, the runlets of clear water which sparkle along the side of either pavement.