through it, undisturbed by the shower of roof and wall material which fell over his pachydermatous back. He coolly walked to the opposite wall—if he could be said to walk in a space scarcely longer than himself—set his fore-foot against it, and made himself a breach clean through it, which afforded him an exit as capacious as his entrance.
Just so does a new line come crashing and smashing through a lath-and-plaster region of the City, breaking down one end of a house, and passing, through the opposite side, into the next. But what is worse, the black elephant remains for ever, as if entranced, across the thoroughfare; solidly built upon an Act of Parliament, in the form of an iron tubular disfigurement. How can this new accident of our architectural condition be dealt with? Perhaps the past may be able to teach us.
There is nothing, at any previous period, which so nearly resembles the inroads of the railway into London, as the invasion, by aqueducts, of ancient Rome.
No one, who has visited that city, can have overlooked, or forgotten, those long lines of arches, sometimes unbroken for miles, which bestride the Campagna, like files of camels crossing the desert, and bringing to some isolated city the merchandise or the luxuries of a more favoured climate. And so, in sooth, they do. They are caravans, that hourly bring from the hill districts around, that most necessary quickener of languid life, and restorer of feverish existence, in a southern climate—delicious water in streams, sparkling and bounding over the arid sultri-
