While thus referring, however, to this instance of British railroad conservatism, which with a stolid indifference seems to ignore the teachings of every day life and to meet constantly recurring experience with a calm defiance, it will not do for the American railroad manager to pride himself too much on his own greater ingenuity and more amenable disposition. The Angola disaster has been referred to, as well as that at Shipton. If the absence of the bell-cord had indeed any part in the fatality of the latter, the presence in cars crowded with passengers of iron pots full of living fire lent horrors before almost unheard of to the former. The methods of accomplishing needed results which are usual to any people are never easily changed, whether in Europe or in America; but certainly the disasters which have first and last ensued from the failure to devise any safe means of heating passenger coaches in this country are out of all proportion to those which can be attributed in England to the absence of means of communication between the passengers on trains and those in charge of them. There is an American conservatism as well as an English; and when it comes to a question of running risks it would be strange indeed if the greater margin of security were found west of the Atlantic. The security afforded by the bell-cord assuredly has not as yet in this country off-set the danger incident to red-hot stoves. CHAPTER V. TELESCOPING AND THE MILLER PLATFORM. The period of exemption from wholesale railroad slaughters referred to in a previous chapter and which fortunately marked the early days of the system, seems to have lasted some eleven years. The record of great catastrophes opened on the Great Western railway of England, and it opened also, curiously enough, upon the 24th of December, a day which seems to have been peculiarly unfortunate in the annals of that corporation, seeing that it was likewise the date of the Shipton-on-Cherwell disaster. Upon that day, in 1841, a train, while moving through a thick fog at a high rate of speed, came suddenly in contact with a mass of earth that had slid down upon the track from the slope of the cutting. Instantly the whole rear of the train was piled up on the top of the first carriage, which happened to be crowded with passengers, eight of whom were killed on the spot while seventeen others were more or less injured. The coroner's jury returned a verdict of accidental death, and at the same time, as if to give the corporation a forcible hint to look closer to the condition of its roadway, a "deodand" of one hundred pounds was levied on the locomotive and tender. This practice, by the way, of levying a deodand in cases of railroad accidents resulting in loss of life, affords a curious illustration of how seldom those accidents must have occurred. The mere mention of it now as ever having existed sounds almost as strange and unreal as would an