These notes from Mr. Hall and Mr. Fairbairn to Mr. (now Sir Edward) Watkin[133] arose from the latter repeating what Mr. Robert Stephenson had related, of his meeting with Trevithick and Gerard at the inn at Carthagena. Stephenson said, "on his way home from Colombo, and in the public room at the inn, he was much struck by the appearance and manner of two tall persons speaking English; the taller of them, wearing a large-brimmed straw or whitish hat, paced restlessly from end to end of the room." Gerard and Stephenson entered into conversation, and Trevithick joined them. Stephenson said that he had a hundred pounds in his pocket, of which he gave fifty to Trevithick to enable him to reach England. It seems that had it not been for Mr. Hall's quick eye and steady hand rescuing Trevithick from the jaws of the blind alligator, he never would have returned to his native country. [Footnote 133: Sir Edward Watkin contemplated writing a life of Trevithick.] Here was the inventor of the locomotive a beggar in a strange land, helped by the man whom he had nursed in baby-boyhood, then returning to England to become a great railway engineer in making known the use of the locomotive on the level road of the Liverpool and Manchester, while the real inventor, who looked upon railways and locomotives as things of a quarter of a century before, was about to recommend them as the means of passing across the isthmus of Costa Rica from the Atlantic to the Pacific, over the heights of the Cordillera, by the river San Juan from Greytown, and by its tributary the Serapique, then by railway towards the high ground of San José, the capital, and down the western slope, passing, somewhere not far from the mines, forward to the Gulf of Nicoya in the Pacific. The approximate distance would be fifty miles of river navigation, and eighty or a hundred of railway, with perhaps stiffish but still manageable inclines, and no avalanches. A loan by the Costa Rica Government of 1872 states,[134] "for the completion of the railway from the port of Limon, in the Atlantic Ocean, to San José de Costa Rica, and on to Heredia and Alajuela," near to Trevithick's mines, as if to carry out his design of forty-six years ago to connect the Atlantic and Pacific by railway. [Footnote 134: See 'The Times,' 7th May, 1872.] CHAPTER XXIV. RETURN TO ENGLAND.