Yet although Glasgow is, in its population, the “second city of the Empire,” coming next after London, it is by no means the centre of so great a number of smaller townships as Manchester, and by consequence the approach, along crowded streets to the centre of the city, is not so lengthy. Bothwell, at the very furthest, is the limit, and is nine miles from the Exchange at Glasgow. Laurel Bank and the suburb of Uddingston follow, and to this fringe in these days the electric tramways extend. To these marches of the city succeed Broomhouse and some busy outlying collieries of the Lanarkshire coal-fields, Mount Vernon railway station, and Tolcross. It was at the approach to Tolcross, soon after the mail-coach to London had been established, that a desperate attempt to wreck and rob the mail was made. The road at that time passed through a small fir wood, where a strong rope was stretched across the highway and securely fastened at either end to tree-trunks, at the height of the places usually occupied by coachman and guard; but, as it happened, a slow-moving hay-waggon came along first, instead of the more quickly moving van, and the waggoner got rather a surprise. XXXV [Sidenote: _GLASGOW CROSS_] At Tolcross, the traveller has at last arrived at Glasgow, and enters there, into the wealthy city, by the meanest of back-doors. Tolcross and its lengthy continuation, Gallowgate, are one long-drawn slum, and so conduct shamelessly to the very heart of things: the junction of Trongate, Saltmarket, and High Street, where stands the old centre of the city in coaching days, Glasgow Cross. Here Glasgow is at its busiest, and the hurrying crowds look as though they had little time for sentiment. Yet the Glasgow people have, of course, an interest in Sir Walter Scott, and some there are who can point out to the stranger the house, once an inn, in King Street, turning out of Trongate, which Scott once frequented. It was perhaps the original of the “Luckie Flyter’s Hostelry” in _Rob Roy_. The pilgrim will be bidden look at the iron ring to which Sir Walter, in common with many another traveller, secured his horse. But there is little enough of this sort of thing: railways old and railways new; railways above and railways below, and electric tramcars on the surface, are the chief things in evidence. Here you see the Cross station of the underground railway, cheek by jowl with the old equestrian statue of William the Third, that tells you, without more ado, of Glasgow’s old Whiggish complexion of politics: the tall steeple of the old Tolbooth, and straddling the sidewalk, the tower of the Tron Church. The Tron itself (it was a public weighing-machine) went very long ago, together with the pleasant custom of nailing to it the ears of those tradesfolk who gave short weight.