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 TALES
 FROM
 "BLACKWOOD"

 Contents of this Volume

 _The Glenmutchkin Railway. By Professor Aytoun_

 _Vanderdecken's Message Home_

 _The Floating Beacon_

 _Colonna the Painter_

 _Napoleon. By J. G. Lockhart_

 _A Legend of Gibraltar. By Col. E. B. Hamley_

 _The Iron Shroud. By William Mudford_

 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON




TALES FROM "BLACKWOOD."




 HOW WE GOT UP THE GLENMUTCHKIN RAILWAY
 AND HOW WE GOT OUT OF IT

BY PROFESSOR AYTOUN.

[_MAGA._ OCTOBER 1845.]

[The following Tale appeared in the Magazine for October 1845. It was
intended by the writer as a sketch of some of the more striking
features of the railway mania (then in full progress throughout Great
Britain), as exhibited in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Although bearing the
appearance of a burlesque, it was in truth an accurate delineation (as
will be acknowledged by many a gentleman who had the misfortune to be
"out in the Forty-five"); and subsequent disclosures have shown that
it was in no way exaggerated.

Although the "Glenmutchkin line" was purely imaginary, and not
intended by the writer to apply to any particular scheme then before
the public, it was identified in Scotland with more than one reckless
and impracticable project; and even the characters introduced were
supposed to be typical of personages who had attained some notoriety
in the throng of speculation. Any such resemblances must be considered
as fortuitous; for the writer cannot charge himself with the
discourtesy of individual satire or allusion.]


I was confoundedly hard up. My patrimony, never of the largest, had
been for the last year on the decrease--a herald would have emblazoned
it, "ARGENT, a money-bag improper, in detriment"--and though the
attenuating process was not excessively rapid, it was, nevertheless,
proceeding at a steady ratio. As for the ordinary means and appliances
by which men contrive to recruit their exhausted exchequers, I knew
none of them. Work I abhorred with a detestation worthy of a scion of
nobility; and, I believe, you could just as soon have persuaded the
lineal representative of the Howards or Percys to exhibit himself in
the character of a mountebank, as have got me to trust my person on
the pinnacle of a three-legged stool. The rule of three is all very
well for base mechanical souls; but I flatter myself I have an
intellect too large to be limited to a ledger. "Augustus," said my
poor mother to me, while stroking my hyacinthine tresses, one fine
morning, in the very dawn and budding-time of my existence--"Augustus,
my dear boy, whatever you do, never forget that you are a gentleman."
The maternal maxim sunk deeply into my heart, and I never for a moment
have forgotten it.

Notwithstanding this aristocratic resolution, the great practical
question, "How am I to live?" began to thrust itself unpleasantly
before me. I am one of that unfortunate class who have neither uncles
nor aunts. For me, no yellow liverless individual, with characteristic
bamboo and pigtail--emblems of half-a-million--returned to his native
shores from Ceylon or remote Penang. For me, no venerable spinster
hoarded in the Trongate, permitting herself few luxuries during a
long-protracted life, save a lass and a lanthorn, a parrot, and the
invariable baudrons of antiquity. No such luck was mine. Had all
Glasgow perished by some vast epidemic, I should not have found myself
one farthing the richer. There would have been no golden balsam for me
in the accumulated woes of Tradestown, Shettleston, and Camlachie. The
time has been when--according to Washington Irving and other veracious
historians--a young man had no sooner got into difficulties than a
guardian angel appeared to him in a dream, with the information that
at such and such a bridge, or under such and such a tree, he might
find, at a slight expenditure of labour, a gallipot secured with
bladder, and filled with glittering tomauns; or in the extremity
of despair, the youth had only to append himself to a cord, and
straightway the other end thereof, forsaking its staple in the
roof, would disclose amidst the fractured ceiling the glories of a
profitable pose. These blessed days have long since gone by--at any
rate, no such luck was mine. My guardian angel was either woefully
ignorant of metallurgy or the stores had been surreptitiously
ransacked; and as to the other expedient, I frankly confess I should
have liked some better security for its result, than the precedent
of the "Heir of Lynn."

It is a great consolation amidst all the evils of life, to know that,
