Still the engine speeds onwards, untired, at undiminished pace. She and her train are near to Blisworth, 62½ miles from London, and it is four miles south of this station that she is allowed her first draught of water. Of solid food she has still enough, for of the four to five tons of coal with which she started on her journey, she has not consumed more than a ton and a-half. Not far from Roade Station, on each side of the railway, is a reservoir of pure water, and at this part of the line the gradient is as nearly as possible level. Within the rails, both “down” and “up” sides, are placed two narrow troughs, each about a quarter of a mile long. By means of syphons the water is conveyed from the reservoirs to the troughs, and just as the engine approaches, a small inclined plane with wooden sides, such as the inclines by which luggage is dashed from packet-piers to steamers, is lowered from the front of the engine. The inclined plane brought in contact with the water compels it, contrary to all hydraulic principles, to ascend along it, until the water is deposited in the tank of the tender. As the engine approaches the end of the trough, the inclined plane is, by the simplest possible means, drawn up, and the engine has a fresh supply of water that would enable her to go fully as long again as the distance she has already completed. These reservoirs are now found so useful that there is a pair of them on the London side of Watford, another between Warrington and Newton Junction, and a third on the London side of Conway, as near as can be half-way between Holyhead and Chester. Four miles from Blisworth, on the right, stands Northampton, famed for its production of shoes, unequalled, as regards numbers, in any other part of the kingdom, and for its obstinate persistence (in the blind and unenlightened period of railway history) in refusing to allow the London and Birmingham Line to come within a less distance than 25,000 yards between it and its shoddy-shoebility. Independently of the injury which this obstinacy has ever since inflicted upon the town, it cost the railway company a loss in money of more than a million sterling, a lengthened and inferior section of railway, a tunnel 2,423 yards long (only 217 less than a mile and a-half), which, during its construction, ruined four contractors and caused the deaths of upwards of a hundred working men. Finally, the obstinacy of Northampton delayed the opening through of the railway from London to Birmingham for fully two years. No wonder, then, that its present generation of men is ashamed of the deed. Some go so far as to deny it altogether; others are more scrupulous, and only palliate it with excuses of which quibbling and petty ingenuity are the joint parents. “There is nothing like leather;” the only question is—its application.