exhausted frame, and are the long, toiling lines
of carriages which carry you entitled to be called
trains of pleasure?

This kind of amusement (if amusement it be)
has been growing more cheap, and consequently
more popular every year, especially under the
wild competitive battles which have arisen from
the mutual jealousies of different railways.
Leeds may not only be a distant, but a
somewhat uninviting industrial town, until the
chance of going there and back for half-a-crown
invests it with charms that are wholly
irresistible.

Wolverhampton will not be offended if I say
that it is not a modern Athens, and yet it can
always command its streams of excursion
visitors, when its railways are disposed to be
liberal. Your clerks or your shopmen despise
the dissipation which their fathers enjoyed, and
when they now hear the chimes at midnight,
it is often in a railway carriage. They leave
their work and their ledgers on a Saturday at
noon, and when they return on the following
Monday, it is, perhaps, from the borders of
Devonshire.

I have travelled a good deal in excursion
trains myself, and I have seen the distances
of journeys gradually lengthened from
tens of miles to hundreds of miles, without the
periods of resting time being in any degree
altered or extended. While I am perfectly
ready to admit that a large amount of instruction
may be derived from such wild marchings into
the bowels of the country, I am not so ready to
admit that there can be much recreation in
becoming a volunteer courier or an amateur
Queen's messenger.

I am at this moment slowly recovering from the
exhausting effects of two excursion trains, and I
put it to any sensible person whether they may
fairly be considered trains of pleasure. Number
One was an excursion deep into the central mining
districts of my native land, and it involved the
following labour and proceedings:

I was called by a policeman at five A.M.—no
great hardship this, perhaps, as it was on a fine
July morning. I had been shaved overnight, so
that my toilet was not very irksome; and, about
half-past five, or a quarter to six, I closed the
door of my house with a hollow bang behind
me, and sallied out into the silent street to
mingle with yellow-faced, sleepy-eyed, worn-out
constables, early breakfast-stall keepers, and
hurrying workmen. The air was clear, as it
always is at this hour, and at this period of the
year, and I had my reward in seeing my
commonplace parish church looking perfectly lovely
through the transparent medium. A quiet walk
of three-quarters of an hour brought me to the
railway station at King's-cross, from which my
train of pleasure was advertised to start at seven
o'clock precisely.

Having half an hour in which to get my breakfast
and select my place in the train of pleasure,
I order some coffee at the refreshment counter,
and proceed to regale myself. I cannot sit down,
from a fidgety sense that I have no time to
spare, and I make the thick fluid and dry
biscuit more repugnant and indigestible by repeated
glances at a large clock on the wall before me.
At last I am found seated in my train of pleasure,
a quarter of an hour before it is likely to
start—my carriage being one of many vehicles,
and I being one of about four hundred passengers.
Not many minutes after seven A.M. we
steam out of the station; and, after a splendid
run of four hours at express speed through the
flat country, and past the red-bricked towns,
and the square churches which line the Great
Northern Railway, I find myself at Doncaster.
My two other railway companions in the first-
class coupé carriage have hardly spoken the
whole way through. One has looked out of the
window as if in a trance, and the other has done
nothing but read a newspaper.

Finding myself in Yorkshire at an hour when
I usually rise from the perusal of my morning
papers, I am naturally led to ask myself what
purpose has brought me there. I knew, before
I started, that my journey had something to do
with coal mining and the coal trade, but I am
induced to search further and inquire again. I
find that the directors of the Great Northern
Railway had consented that, from the 1st of July,
1859, the produce of each of the various South
Yorkshire collieries shall be sold with the name
of the colliery, and unmixed with any other coal.
The owners of the best coal regard this as such
a boon that they have resolved to celebrate this
separation of qualities by a train of pleasure to
the "three pits", and free passes are issued to a
wide circle accordingly. Behold me—who know
no more of the mysteries of the coal trade than
others, who like to burn good coal, when they
can get it—at Doncaster, then, one hundred and
fifty-seven miles, by rail, from London, as the
first stage in my train of pleasure to celebrate
the separation of the qualities.

Ten minutes being consumed in shunting the
train and refreshing the crowd of visitors, we
are again upon our railway road for the first of
the three pits—the notorious Lundhill Colliery.
Here it was that, on Thursday, the nineteenth
of February, 1857, one hundred and ninety-two
men and boys perished by the most fearful
explosion that has ever distinguished mining
history. Like the ruins of a battle-field, the signs
of such a catastrophe are soon cleared away,
but the widows and orphans remain. They
remain to receive this train of pleasure with
wonder, smiles, and shouts—a dense group of
sunburnt women and children, whose clean caps
and aprons look doubly and deceptively clean,
brought out, as they are, by the background
of black ashes, smoke, and coal-dust.

The visitors who are assembled to celebrate
the separation of the qualities, rush up a grimy
ladder on to a grimy platform, and look down
the smooth brick side of the pit's mouth. At
their back is the engine-house, where the engine
draws up or lets down the chain which supports
the cage; and at their side, to the east, is
the ventilation shaft—a chimney that runs
parallel to the descending shaft, and terminates