Some two months later, on New Year's Day, 1840, Bradshaw brought out his little work in an amended form, with a brand-new title. This gave him further opportunities, in the course of its thirty-eight pages, for maps and letterpress, and to it he gave the title of "Railway Companion." It is really in size and type and style the same thing as the time-tables; but being sold at a shilling was continued distinct from the time-tables until it was merged into the "Guide" in 1848. There is some interesting, if somewhat startling, information in the "Companion." One can only gasp at being confronted by "A table showing the rate of travelling from one to four hundred miles an hour." These rosy anticipations have not yet been realized--not even in the velocity of the electric mono-rail. [Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST COPY OF "BRADSHAW."] How, it may be asked, did the railway companies of 1840 receive the first general railway guide? Odd to relate, not with any great favour. They even refused to supply their time-tables to Bradshaw when they ascertained the use to which that enterprising Quaker was putting them. "Why," they said, "if this fellow goes on in this way he will make punctuality a kind of obligation, with penalties for failure. Whereas at present, if the ten minutes past three train steams gently out at twenty minutes to four, or even four o'clock, we do not fall much in the esteem of the public, accustomed to the free and easy methods of the stage-coach." But the Quaker was not thus to be repressed. He got hold of the time-tables somehow: he waited in person on the boards; afterwards he even purchased stock in the hostile railway companies, and the enterprise went on. But as yet the guides we have been describing were not regularly issued. They were mere fitful publications, and it was not until Adams, whom Bradshaw had secured as his London agent, urged upon him the necessity of a regular issue that the first monthly "Guide" made its _début_ in the world. This was on December 1st, 1841. The "Guide" differed from its predecessors in being bound in paper--not cloth--and in consisting of but thirty-two pages of printed matter. By this time, too, Bradshaw could announce that "This work is published monthly, under the direction and with the assistance of the railway companies, and is carefully corrected up to the date it bears; every reliance may, therefore, be placed on the accuracy of its details." Moreover, it was dispensed in another and simpler form. The pages of which it was composed were arranged on a single large sheet or "broadside," "exhibiting at one view the hours of departure and arrival of the trains on every railway in the kingdom, and are particularly adapted for counting-houses and places of business." For this sheet only threepence was demanded, but if mounted on stiff boards the price was two shillings and ninepence.