In the midst of all these alarms and prophecies of failure, Stephenson never lost heart, but held to his purpose. His motto was “Persevere!” “You must go on filling in,” he said; “there is no other help for it. The stuff emptied in is doing its work out of sight, and if you will but have patience, it will soon begin to show.” And so the filling in went on; several hundreds of men and boys were employed to skin the Moss all round for many thousand yards, by means of sharp spades, called by the turf cutters “tommy-spades;” and the dried cakes of turf were afterwards used to form the embankment, until at length as the stuff sank and rested upon the bottom, the bank gradually rose above the surface, and slowly advanced onwards, declining in height and consequently in weight, until it became joined to the floating road already laid upon the Moss. In the course of forming the embankment, the pressure of the bog turf tipped out of the waggons caused a copious stream of bog-water to flow from the end of it, in colour resembling Barclay’s double stout; and when completed, the bank looked like a long ridge of tightly pressed tobacco-leaf. The compression of the turf may be imagined from the fact that 670,000 cubic yards of raw moss formed only 277,000 cubic yards of embankment at the completion of the work. At the western, or Liverpool end of the Chat Moss, there was a like embankment; but, as the ground there was solid, little difficulty was experienced in forming it, beyond the loss of substance caused by the oozing out of the water held by the moss-earth. At another part of the Liverpool and Manchester line, Parr Moss was crossed by an embankment about 1½ mile in extent. In the immediate neighbourhood was found a large excess of cutting, which it would have been necessary to “put out in spoil-banks” (according to the technical phrase); but the surplus clay, stone, and shale, were tipped, waggon after waggon, into Parr Moss, until a solid but concealed embankment, from fifteen to twenty-five feet high, was formed, although to the eye it appears to be laid upon the level of the adjoining surface, as at Chat Moss.