It is curious, nowadays, to look back upon the time when the Great Western Railway was first built. The authorities of Eton College, together with the Court, had effectually driven the railway from Windsor and Eton, and the College people had also secured the insertion of a clause in the Company's Act forbidding the erection of a station at Slough. Notwithstanding this, however, trains stopped at Slough from the very first. The Company did this by an ingenious evasion of the spirit, if not the letter, of their Parliamentary obligations. By their Act they were forbidden to _build a station_ at Slough, but nothing had been said about trains stopping there! Accordingly, two rooms were hired at a public house beside the line where Slough station now stands, and tickets were issued there, comfortably enough. The Eton College authorities were maddened by this smart dodge, and applied for an injunction against the Company, which was duly refused. This is not the only railway romance belonging to Slough, for the Slough signal-box has had a romance of its own. The cabin was erected in 1844, and one of the earliest messages the signalman wired to London by the then wonderful new invention of the electric telegraph, was intelligence of the birth of the Duke of Edinburgh. The following year a man named Tawell committed a murder at Salt Hill, and escaped by the next train to London; but information was telegraphed to town, and being arrested as he stepped from the carriage at Paddington, he was subsequently tried and hanged. The telegraphist warned the officials at Paddington to look out for a man dressed like a Quaker. It is a singular circumstance that the original telegraphic code did not comprise any signal for the letter "Q;" but the telegraphist was not to be beaten. He spelled the word "Kwaker." Sir Francis Head has recorded how he was travelling along the line, months after, in a crowded carriage. "Not a word had been spoken since the train left London, but as we neared Slough Station, a short-bodied, short-necked, short-nosed, exceedingly respectable-looking man in the corner, fixing his eyes on the apparently fleeting wires, nodded to us as he muttered aloud, "Them's the cords that hung John Tawell!"[2] XIX It will not surprise those who are acquainted with the history of Bath, and the crowds of rich travellers who travelled thither, to learn that Hounslow Heath had not long been left behind before another highwayman's territory was entered upon. This stretched roughly from Salt Hill, on the east, to Maidenhead Thicket, on the west. It would, of course, have been ill gleaning after the harvest had been reaped by the pick of the profession on the Heath, and, as a matter of fact, the gangs who infested Maidenhead Thicket and Salt Hill confined their attention to travellers _returning_ from Bath. Hawkes was the chief of them, and his was a name of dread. [Sidenote: _THE "FLYING HIGHWAYMAN"_]