Anyhow, thus did the six hours swiftly pass in those unregenerate days. For Mr. Savin had yet to build his Borth hotel and lodging houses, which to-day give welcome shelter to a very different throng of visitors, summer after summer, attracted by the placid beauties and the invigorating air of Cardigan Bay. It was, at worst, but a temporary orgy, marking, as it were, a new epoch in the life of the Cambrian; whose lengthening limbs now stretched from the Severn to the sea. CHAPTER VI. THE BATTLE OF ELLESMERE. "_The question of a railway is now or never_."--THE LATE MR. R. G. JEBB, of Ellesmere. No period, since the wild days of the "railway mania," was more pregnant of schemes than the later months of 1860. They sprang up like mushrooms all along the Shropshire border, and some of them, like mushrooms, as suddenly suffered decay. A facetious Salopian prophet ventured publicly to predict that "we shall hear next of a railway to Llansilin (a remote village among the border hills) or the moon." His ratiocination was hardly exaggerated. A "preliminary prospectus" was actually published for carrying a railway, at a cost of under 10,000 pounds per mile, from Shrewsbury, through Kinnerley and Porthywaen, thence "near Llanfyllin and Llanrhaiadr," to Llangynog, "through the Berwyn hills" to Llandrillo, and so to Dolgelley and Portmadoc. It was to be worked and maintained by the West Midland, Shrewsbury and Coast of Wales Railway Co.; the prospects of mineral and passenger traffic were "most promising," and throughout its entire length of 90 miles, the promoters pointed out with all the emphasis which italics can afford, "it has _only one tunnel_, and that slightly exceeding a mile and half in length." Eventually, a line, partly following this route, under the less comprehensive title of the West Shropshire Mineral Railway, and later known as "the Potteries," constructed from a station in Abbey Forgate, Shrewsbury, to Llanymynech, and on to Nantmawr, with a branch from Kinnerley to Criggion, ran for a time, then fell into abeyance and disrepair, and was in recent years re-opened under the Light Railways Act as the Shropshire and Montgomeryshire Railway, an independent company.