COUNCILLOR AGAR'S HOUSE, SOMERS TOWN. IN 1830. (See page 369.) since his accession to the title, nor seen his wife since her elopement), the marquisate of Townshend, with the noble estates of Raynham, in Norfolk, and the castle at Tamworth, would have passed to a spurious and supposititious race, the children of a brewer at St. Ives. After the death of the marquis, in December, 1855, his disconsolate wife, having remained a widow for nearly a fortnight, was married by special licence to a Mr. John Laidler, an assistant to a linendraper at the west end of London." In the Euston Road, near the end of Judd Street, is Tonbridge Chapel, a place of worship for Dissenters of the Congregationalist denomination, dating from about the year 1812. Close to Tonbridge Chapel, opposite to the former site of the from the course of treatment carried out by his physicians, he at length decided on a method of his own. "From such men as Culpeper, and others of the old medico-herbalists, he sought advice, and his adventitious career was crowned with success. He found in the gardens of Nature (what his physicians could not find from minerals and from poisons) that alleviation of his disease which ultimately led to his complete recovery. Stimulated by this knowledge, his philanthropy was excited, and he decided to benefit others as he himself had been benefited. This was the origin of his founding the British College of Health." The world-wide fame which Morison's pills speedily attained, as well as the common sale attendant thereon, excited first the astonishment, then the jealousy, and afterwards the malice of the regular practitioners. Action after action was commenced against the proprietor for the sale of "so poisonous an article;" but falling to the ground, they only assisted in still further extending his fame and sale, until his very name became a "household word," which no other medicine has obtained either before or since. Its notoriety was such that Punch of those days continually referred to it. On Morison's death, in the year 1856, a memorial was erected in front of his establishment in the Euston Road by a penny subscription; "no person was allowed to give more than one penny, and no one was to subscribe but those who had derived some benefit from the Hygeist's medicine." The memorial consists of a granite pedestal, surmounted by the British lion, and on the sides of the pedestal are various poetical quotations and remarks. CHAPTER XXVIII. AGAR TOWN, AND THE MIDLAND RAILWAY. Origin of the Midland Railway-Agar Town as it was-A Good Clearance-Underground Operations for the Construction of the Midland Railway and Terminus-Re-interment of a Roman Catholic Dignitary-The Midland Railway-Mr. William Agar-Tom Sayers, the Pugilist-The English “Connemara "—A Monster Hotel-The Midland Terminus: Vast Size of the Roof of the Station-A Railway Goods Bank-The Imperial Gas Works-York Road. THE Midland Railway, unlike most other long lines, was commenced, not in London, but in the provinces, having been originated in 1832 at a village inn on the borders of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, in the necessities of a few coalowners-not of the richest and most influential class. It has, however, gradually found its way from the provinces into London, and has spread out its paths of iron, like a net-work, north and south, east and west, through half the counties of England, till they stretch from the Severn to the Humber, from the Wash to the Mersey, from the Thames to the Solway Firth. Its construction has cost fifty millions of money, bringing in an income of five millions a year; and it has before it an almost unlimited future. We do not intend here to attempt an account of the entire Midland line; but as we have already given some details about the London and North-Western line in our account of Euston Square, so our description of St. Pancras will not be complete without a few particulars about this railway. When this line was brought into London, in 1866, it wrought a mighty revolution in the neighbourhood where we now are. "For its passenger station alone it swept away a church and seven streets of three thousand houses," writes Mr. F. Williams, in his "History of the Midland Railway: a Narrative of Modern Enterprise." "Old St. Pancras churchyard was invaded, and Agar Town almost demolished. Yet those who knew this district at that time have no regret at the change. Time was when the wealthy owner of a large estate had lived here in his mansion; but after his departure the place became a very 'abomination of desolation.' In its centre was what was termed La Belle Isle, a dreary and unsavoury locality, abandoned to mountains of refuse from the metropolitan dust-bins, strewn with decaying vegetables and foul-smelling fragments of what once had been fish, or occupied by knackers'-yards and manure-making, bone-boiling, and soap-manufacturing works, and smoke-belching potteries and brick-kilns. At the broken doors of mutilated houses canaries still sang, and dogs lay basking in the sun, as if to remind one of the vast colonies of bird-fanciers and dog-fanciers who formerly made Agar Town their abode; and from these dwellings came out wretched creatures in rags and dirt, and searched amid the far-extending refuse for the filthy treasure by the aid of which they eked out a miserable livelihood; whilst over the whole neighbourhood the gas-works poured forth their mephitic vapours, and the canal gave forth its rheumatic dampness, extracting in return some of the more poisonous ingredients in the atmosphere, and spreading them upon the surface of the water in a thick scum of various and ominous hues. was Agar Town before the Midland Railway came into the midst of it." Such The above sketch is slightly-but only slightlyoverdrawn; for the canal still flows where it did, and it is known that gas-works, though unsightly, are not really unhealthy neighbours. Be this, how. ever, as it may, a mighty clearance of houses was made, and a population equal to that of ten small boroughs was swept away, as the first step towards a new order of things. The neighbourhood for many months presented the appearance of an utter chaos, with mounds of earth, the débris of houses and tunnels in the course of being dug. By the Agar Town.] SINGULAR IDENTIFICATION OF A SKELETON. 369 foreigner, the darkest-coloured skull must be his. side of the Euston Road, close under the front of the Midland Railway Hotel, was dug a large trench in which was built a tunnel for the use of the Metropolitan Company whenever it shall need to double its present traffic-lines. Further to the north came sweeping round another large cutting in which was to be made the actual junction of the Metropolitan and the Midland lines. "So vast, Shortly after passing the churchyard of Old St. indeed, were these subterranean operations," writes Pancras the line crosses the Regent's Canal, and Mr. Williams, “that the St. Pancras Station became then passes under the North London Railway, like an iceberg, the greater portion of it being which is carried above it by a bridge of three below the surface; indeed, remarkable as is the arches. "Their construction," Mr. Jackson tells engineering skill displayed in the large building us, "was a matter of no ordinary difficulty on which towers so majestically above all its neigh-account of the ceaseless traffic on the line overbours, it is as nothing compared with the works head; it was, however, accomplished without the concealed below ground. For right underneath interruption of a single hour." The Midland line the monster railway station are two other separate is here joined by the branch which comes up from constructions, one above the other, none the less the Metropolitan at King's Cross, as mentioned wonderful because they will never see the light of above. The lines actually converge near the Camden covered-way; but the transfer of passengers day, but are irrevocably doomed usually takes place at Kentish Town Station, half a mile farther from the London Terminus. At Kentish Town a line branches off to Holloway and Tottenham, while the main line is carried by a long tunnel under Haverstock Hill, whence, emerging into open daylight, the trains run on to Hendon and St. Albans, and thence northwards through the "midland" counties. 'To waste their sweetness on the desert air.' These works are the Underground Railway and the Fleet Sewer, while the branch of the Metropolitan that joins the Midland not only crosses it at the southern extremity, but thence runs up under the western side of the station, to re-cross at its northern end to the eastern side, where it gradually rises to its junction about a mile down the line. We have spoken above of the great clearance of houses which was effected in this locality by the formation of the Midland Railway. The district, which is or was-known as Agar Town, consisted mostly of small tenements of the lowest class, named after one Mr. William Agar—or, as he was commonly called, "Councillor Agar," an eccentric and miserly lawyer-to whom the site was let on a short lease for building purposes, about the year 1840. Of the difficulty experienced in carrying the railway through the graveyard of Old St. Pancras Church, and also through that of St. Giles's parish which adjoins it, without any unavoidable disturbance of the dead, we have spoken in a previous chapter;* but we may add here, that, though every precaution was taken by the agents of the Midland Railway Company, a most serio-comic incident occurred during the process. The company Twenty years later the fee-simple of the greater had purchased a new piece of ground in which to re-inter the human remains discovered in the part part of this locality was transferred by the Ecclewhich they required. Among them was the corpse siastical Commissioners, to whom it had reverted, of a high dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church to the Midland Railway Company for a conin France. Orders were received for the transship-siderable sum, and most of the houses have been ment of the remains to his native land, and the delicate work of exhuming the corpse was entrusted to some clever gravediggers. On opening the ground they were surprised to find the bones, not of one man, but of several. Three skulls and three sets of bones were yielded up by the soil in which they had lain mouldering. The difficulty was how to identify the bones of a French ecclesiastic amid so many. After much discussion, the shrewdest of the gravediggers suggested that, as he was a * See ante, p. 336. swept away to form ale and coal stores and other warehouses in connection with the terminus of the Midland Railway, about which we shall speak presently. Much of the vacant ground not required for the company's use has been laid out for building warehouses, and has raised, as it were, another town in the place of this already overcrowded neighbourhood. It can hardly be expected that such a district as this can have any historical associations worth. recording; but still the place has not been without its "celebrities," for here lived for many years the well-known pugilist, Tom Sayers. His notoriety while the critical eye of the student will observe arose from his accepting the challenge of Heenan, the American champion, in 1860, to fight for the champion belt of the world. Sayers was comparatively small in stature, whilst Heenan was much above the ordinary height; and it is said that when Sayers met his monster opponent for the first time he felt a little daunted. The fight, nevertheless, came off, and in the first round Sayers's right arm was broken; but still, with this fractured limb, he continued the encounter for some time, and in the end, if he did not obtain the victory, he made it a drawn battle, and received with Heenan the honour of a double belt. Henceforth Tom Sayers was everywhere greeted as a hero; and at the Stock Exchange a purse of £1,000 was handed to him for his "gallant conduct," on the understanding that he at once retired from the Ring. For a time Sayers was the topic of general conversation; but he did not long survive his triumph, if such it may be called. He died soon afterwards from pulmonary consumption, and was buried, with considerable ceremony, in the Highgate Cemetery, his profile and a portrait of his dog being the only memorials on his tombstone to mark the place of his interment. If the Midland Railway had conferred no other benefit on London and Londoners, our thanks would be due to it for having cleared away the whole, or nearly the whole, of the above-mentioned miserable district of mud and hovels, and given us something better to look upon. So dreary and dirty indeed was the place-though its creation was only of so recent date—that it was styled by Charles Dickens our 66 English Connemara.” It was mainly occupied by costermongers, and by dog and bird fanciers. Having made these general remarks about the line, and of the site which it occupies, we will proceed with a few details concerning the station and the "grand hotel" which adjoins it. The latter building, which abuts upon the Euston Road, facing Judd Street, was opened in 1873, and completed in the spring of 1876. It was erected from the designs of Sir Gilbert Scott, and is constructed chiefly of red brick, with dressings of Bath stone, in the most ornate style of Gothic art. It must be owned that towering as it does into mid air, it is a most beautiful structure; indeed, to quote the words of the "Tourist's Guide," "it stands without a rival in the hotel line, for palatial beauty, comfort, and convenience." The style of architecture is a combination of various mediæval features, the inspection of which recall to mind the Lombardic and Venetian brick Gothic or Gothic-Italian types, A broad terraced carriage-drive, 400 feet in length, separates the hotel from the roadway, and leads by various entrances to the building and archways to the station. Altogether, the hotel has a frontage of about 600 feet; and it is very lofty, consisting of seven storeys, including attics in the sloping roofs. At the south-east corner of the building is a clock-tower 240 feet high, nearly forty feet higher than the Monument at London Bridge. There are bedrooms for upwards of 500 guests, all most luxuriously furnished; and a uniformly mild temperature is maintained in all seasons. The cost of the hotel, with its fittings and furniture, is said to have been not less than half a million pounds sterling. The whole of the arrangements for conducting the business of the hotel, it need hardly be added, are most complete. There are speaking-tubes, electric bells, lifts, and dust-shafts; and an apparatus for the extinction of fire is laid on at every floor. In the basement are spacious and extensive cellars, and a laundry; and it may be added that the whole of the washing and drying is done by steam power. It was found necessary to raise the level of the terminus about fifteen feet higher than the Euston Road, in order to secure good gradients and proper levels for some of the suburban stations. The space underneath was then utilised as a cellarage for the Burton and other ale traffic, and thus the |