traffic manager, and most station masters, in order that a lesson or a caution may be obtained for future guidance. But these accidents will continue to occur—there are, we fear, no real means yet discovered to prevent them—and all that can be hoped for as regards the future is, that as experience of what are in short almost impossible circumstances is accumulating, we may perhaps arrive at an epoch where no further incidents of this character can be combined together for human destruction on railways. What has been already said with reference to the earnestness of railway officials to prevent delays, applies with tenfold additional force to their never-ceasing anxiety to avoid accidents. There is no possible precaution that can be taken, which is not taken to endeavour to prevent them. In every way they are disastrous; they not only create intense personal suffering and misery, they are not only a risk to employés, because at any moment, from an act of imprudence or forgetfulness, employés may be the cause of them, and thereby render themselves liable to punishments that extend even to penal servitude; but even _after_ their occurrence they become to them a source of immediate and immense responsibility. The line must at once, quick almost as the flash of lightning, be protected against trains coming in either direction; the killed and wounded must be removed, and those to whom life still belongs must be attended to with the most earnest solicitude; arrangements must be made, and carried into execution without a moment’s delay, so as to render the line fit for traffic again in the shortest period that human hands, aided with hearty good-will, can accomplish; all these duties must, nevertheless, be executed in the midst of scenes of havoc and misery that are enough to unnerve and prostrate most men, with as much coolness and _sang froid_ as if the man’s services at the moment were not more important than attaching an additional carriage to a train, in consequence of an unusual accession of traffic at a station, or the performance of some other such like formal piece of everyday duty.