the next place, the circle of those included in the consequences of any disaster was necessarily small. It is far otherwise now. For weeks and months the vast machinery moves along, doing its work quickly, swiftly, safely; no one pays any attention to it, while millions daily make use of it. It is as much a necessity of their lives as the food they eat and the air they breathe. Suddenly, somehow, and somewhere,--at Versailles, at Norwalk, at Abergele, at New Hamburg, or at Revere,--at some hitherto unfamiliar point upon an insignificant thread of the intricate iron web, an obstruction is encountered, a jar, as it were, is felt, and instantly, with time for hardly an ejaculation or a thought, a multitude of human beings are hurled into eternity. It is no cause for surprise that such an event makes the community in which it happens catch its breadth; neither is it unnatural that people should think more of the few who are killed, of whom they hear so much, than of the myriads who are carried in safety and of whom they hear nothing. Yet it is well to bear in mind that there are two sides to that question also, and in no way could this fact be more forcibly brought to our notice than by the assertion, borne out by all the statistics we possess, that, irrespective of the vast increase in the number of those who travel, a greater number of passengers in stage-coaches were formerly each year killed or injured by accidents to which they in no way contributed through their own carelessness, than are now killed under the same conditions in our railroad cars. In other words, the introduction of the modern railroad, so far from proportionately increasing the dangers of traveling, has absolutely diminished them. It is not, after all, the dangers but the safety of the modern railroad which should excite our special wonder.