day, or men in swallow-tail coats and high collars.

Another work which Gibson designed during this visit possesses for us a
singular and exceptional interest. It was a statue of George Stephenson,
to be erected at Liverpool. Thus, by a curious coincidence, the
Liverpool stone-cutter was set to immortalize the features and figure of
the Killingworth engine-man. Did those two great men, as they sat
together in one room, sculptor and sitter, know one another's early
history and strange struggles, we wonder? Perhaps not; but if they did,
it must surely have made a bond of union between them. At any rate,
Gibson greatly admired Stephenson, just as he had admired the Stelvio
road. "I will endeavour to give him a look capable of action and
energy," he said; "but he must be contemplative, grave, simple. He is a
good subject. I wish to make him look like an Archimedes."

If Gibson admired Stephenson, however, he did not wholly admire
Stephenson's railways. The England he had left was the England of mail-
coaches. In Italy, he had learnt to travel by carriage, after the
fashion of the country; but these new whizzing locomotives, with their
time-tables, and their precision, and their inscrutable mysteries of
shunts and junctions, were quite too much for his simple, childish, old-
world habits. He had a knack of getting out too soon or too late, which
often led him into great confusion. Once, when he wanted to go to
Chichester, he found himself landed at Portsmouth, and only discovered
his mistake when, on asking the way to the cathedral, he was told there
was no cathedral in the town at all. Another story of how he tried to
reach Wentworth, Lord Fitzwilliam's place, is best told in his own
words. "The train soon stopped at a small station, and, seeing some
people get out, I also descended; when, in a moment, the train moved on
--faster and faster--and left me standing on the platform. I walked a few