Indeed, the luck--for it was nothing else--of those earlier times was truly amazing. Thus on this same Manchester & Liverpool road, as a first-class train on the morning of April 17, 1836, was moving at a speed of some thirty miles an hour, an axle broke under the first passenger coach, causing the whole train to leave the track and throwing it down the embankment, which at that point was twenty feet high. The cars were rolled over, and the passengers in them tumbled about topsy-turvey; nor, as they were securely locked in, could they even extricate themselves when at last the wreck of the train reached firm bearings. And yet no one was killed. Here the corporation was saved by one chance in a thousand, and its almost miraculous good fortune has since received numerous and terrible illustrations. Among these two are worthy of a more than passing mention. They happened one in America and one in England, though with some interval of time between them, and are curious as illustrating very forcibly the peculiar dangers to which those travelling by rail in the two countries are subjected under almost precisely similar circumstances. The American accident referred to was that popularly known on account of its exceptionally harrowing details as the "Angola horror," of December 18, 1867, while the English accident was that which occurred at Shipton-on-Cherwell on December 24, 1874. CHAPTER II. THE ANGOLA AND SHIPTON ACCIDENTS. On the day of the Angola accident the eastern bound express train over the Lake Shore road, as it was then called, consisted of a locomotive, four baggage, express and mail cars, an emigrant and three first-class passenger coaches. It was timed to pass Angola, a small way station in the extreme western part of New York, at 1.30 P.M., without stopping; but on the day in question it was two hours and forty-five minutes late, and was consequently running rapidly. A third of a mile east of the station there is a shallow stream, known as Big Sister creek, flowing in the bottom of a ravine the western side of which rises abruptly to the level of the track, while on the eastern side there is a gradual ascent of some forty or fifty rods. This ravine was spanned by a deck bridge of 160 feet in length, at the east end of which was an abutment of mason work some fifty feet long connecting with an embankment beyond. It subsequently appeared that the forward axle in the rear truck of the rear car was slightly bent. The defect was not perceptible to the eye, but in turning round the space between the flanges of the wheels of that axle varied by three-fourths of an inch. As long as the car was travelling on an unbroken track, or as long as the wheels did not strike any break in the track at their narrowest point, this slight bend in the axle was of no consequence. There was a frog in the track, however, at a distance of 600 feet east of the Angola station, and it so happened that a wheel of the defective