“Many accidents take place that never get into the papers; many trains, full of passengers, escape being dashed to pieces by next door to a miracle. Nobody knows anything about it but the driver and the stoker. I remember once, when I was driving on the Eastern Counties. Going round a curve, I suddenly saw a train coming along on the same line of rails. I clapped on the brake, but it was too late, I thought. Seeing the engine almost close upon us, I cried to my stoker to jump. He jumped off the engine, almost before the words were out of my mouth. I was just taking my hand off the lever to follow, when the coming train turned off on the points, and the next instant the hind coach passed my engine by a shave. It was the nearest touch I ever saw. My stoker was killed. In another half second I should have jumped off and been killed too. What would have become of the train without us is more than I can tell you. “There are heaps of people run over, that no one ever hears about. One dark night in the Black Country, me and my mate felt something wet and warm splash in our faces. ‘That didn’t come from the engine, Bill,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said; ‘it’s something thick, Jim.’ It was blood. That’s what it was. We heard afterwards that a collier had been run over. When we kill any of our own chaps, we say as little about it as possible. It’s generally—mostly always—their own fault. No, we never think of danger ourselves. We’re used to it, you see. But we’re not reckless. I don’t believe there’s any body of men that takes more pride in their work than engine-drivers do. We are as proud and as fond of our engines as if they were living things; as proud of them as a huntsman or a jockey is of his horse. And a engine has almost as many ways as a horse; she’s a kicker, a plunger, a roarer, or what not, in her way. Put a stranger on to my engine, and he wouldn’t know what to do with her. Yes; there’s wonderful improvements in engines since the last great Exhibition. Some of them take up their water without stopping. That’s a wonderful invention, and yet as simple as A B C. There are water-troughs at certain places, lying between the rails. By moving a lever you let down the mouth of a scoop into the water, and as you rush along the water is forced into the tank, at the rate of three thousand gallons a minute.