“_Familiar in their Mouths as HOUSEHOLD WORDS._”—SHAKESPEARE. HOUSEHOLD WORDS. A WEEKLY JOURNAL. CONDUCTED BY CHARLES DICKENS. N^{o.} 21.] SATURDAY, AUGUST 17, 1850. [PRICE 2_d._ THE RAILWAY WONDERS OF LAST YEAR. The unblushing individual who inflated the first bubble prospectus in the early days of Railway scheming must regard, if he be still in existence (and we have good reason to believe that he lives, a prosperous gentleman), with superlative amazement the last Report of Her Majesty’s Railway Commissioners. When in his dazzling document the preposterous “promoter” certified the forthcoming goods transit at six times the amount his most sanguine “traffic-taker” could conscientiously compute; when he quadrupled the boldest calculations of the expected number of passengers—when, in short, he projected his prognostics beyond the widest bounds of probability, and then added a few cyphers at the end of each sum, to make “round numbers”—he was not so mad as to believe that he lied in the least like truth. Mad as he was _not_, he never could have supposed that an after-time would come when his lying prospectus would be pronounced as far short of, as his mendacious imagination endeavoured to make it exceed, the Truth. But that time has arrived. Let us suppose a friend of his, a far-seeing prophet, reading a proof of the pet prospectus by the aid of magnifying glasses; let us figure the statistical foreteller of future events assuring its author that, twenty years thence, his immeasurable exaggerations would be out-exaggerated by what should actually come to pass; that his brazen bait to catch share-jobbers would shrink—when placed beside the Railway records of eighteen-hundred-and-forty-nine—into a puny, minimised, understatement. How he would have laughed! How immediately his mind would have reverted from the sanguine seer to the terminus of flighty intellects known as Bedlam. With what remarkable unction he would have said, “Phoo! Phoo! My good fellow, you must be lapsing into lunacy. What! Do you mean to say I have not laid it on thick enough? Why, look here!” and he turns to the latest of the Stamp Office stage-coach returns: “Do you mean to tell me—now that coach travelling has arrived at perfection, and that the wonderful average of coach passengers is six millions a year—that, instead of quadrupling the number of travellers who are likely to use my line, I ought to multiply them by a hundred? Why, you may as well try to persuade me that I ought to promise for our locomotives twenty, instead of fifteen, miles an hour; which—Heaven forgive me—I have had the courage to set down. Stuff! If I were to romance at that rate, we should not sell a share.”