Turning now from the American to the English accident, it is singular to note how under very similar circumstances much the same fatality resulted from wholly different causes. It happened on the day immediately preceding Christmas, and every train which at that holiday season leaves London is densely packed, for all England seems then to gather away from its cities to the country hearths. Accordingly, the ten o'clock London express on the Great Western Railway, when it left Oxford that morning, was made up of no less than fifteen passenger carriages and baggage vans, drawn by two powerful locomotives and containing nearly three hundred passengers. About seven miles north of Oxford, as the train, moving at a speed of some thirty to forty miles an hour, was rounding a gentle curve in the approach to the bridge over the little river Cherwell, the tire of one of the wheels of the passenger coach next behind the locomotive broke, throwing it off the track. For a short distance it was dragged along in its place; but almost immediately those in charge of the locomotives noticed that something was wrong, and, most naturally and with the very best of intensions, they instantly did the very worst thing which under the circumstances it was in their power to do,--they applied their brakes and reversed their engines; their single thought was to stop the train. With the train equipped as it was, however, had these men, instead of crowding on their brakes and reversing their engines, simply shut off their steam and by a gentle application of the brakes checked the speed gradually and so as to avoid any strain on the couplings, the carriages would probably have held together and remained upon the road-bed. Instead of this, however, the sudden checking of the two ponderous locomotives converted them into an anvil, as it were, upon which the unfortunate leading carriage already off the rails was crushed under the weight and impetus of those behind it. The train instantly zig-zagged in every direction under the pressure, the couplings which connected it together snapping, and the carriages, after leaving the rails to the right and left and running down the embankment of about thirteen feet in height, came to a stand-still at last, several of them in the reverse order from that which they had held while in the train. The first carriage was run over and completely destroyed; the five rear ones were left alone upon the road-bed, and of these two only were on the rails; of the ten which went down the embankment, two were demolished. In this disaster thirty-four passengers lost their lives, and sixty-five others, besides four employés of the company, were injured.