us, I dare say—those strange terms "shunting,"
"sidings," "switches," "points," "buffers,"
"stokers," " sleepers," " brakesmen," and the
like? At what time of day was it that people left
off saying half-past twelve, and called the
half-hour following noon " twelve thirty?" Who could
have been the first sage who devised the model
of a first-class carriage? There is, decidedly,
originality in the conception of those scroll-like
padded partitions and arm rests; yet very slight
alterations have taken place in the English
railway train since its first appearance, sudden and
ready made, like Cinderella's coach and horses,
from the pumpkin. The lamp in the roof, and
the rack for sticks and umbrellas, have been
added, with some trifles in the way of interior
gilding and flower painting; and, when this
old cap was new, the second-class carriages on
the Great Western railway were open at the
sides, and protected only by leathern curtains,
while the third-class carriages, as a rule, were
the mere seat-less and unsheltered cattle-trucks
that still linger on the road from London to
Greenwich. Again, it is since this old cap had
lost a considerable extent of its bran-newness
that railway stations have become galleries of
art, and that waiting-rooms, platform walls, and
even panels formed in the sides of cuttings, have
been decorated with monstrous cartoons having
reference, in the most floridly pictorial manner, to
the language of the eye—which, so far as its
advertising eloquence is concerned, mentions very
plainly the name of Mrs. Elizabeth Martin—to
food for cattle, perambulators, Arabian bedsteads,
Sydenham trousers (which I have yet to learn
are true to their name in being constructed of
iron and glass), and other ingenious devices of
that which was a trade when this old cap was
new, but which, fostered by the immortal Warren
and the incomparable Rowland, has now grown
into an elaborate science—and a very offensive,
impertinent science too—tending chiefly to the
glorification of impudence and the success of lies.
Beyond these particulars, railways seem not much
to have altered since the cap was new. The
same old by-laws, approved by "Granville" and
"Edward Ryan," stare one in the face in the
entrance halls. Our railway companies have not
yet been able to manage a decent proportion of
smoking-carriages, and the consumer of a cigar
is still obliged to go through a process of genteel
fraud and elegant bribery and corruption, at the
risk of being pounced upon and denounced by a
disguised director reading the Edinburgh Review
in the corner. Hot water cases in first-class
carriages in winter are as yet (generally speaking)
institutions too subversive for the squeamish
nerves of the directors; and, though I suppose
improvements have gone on in the engineer's
department till perfection is the result, the
engine, with the exception of the huge pair of
glass goggles in front of the driver, looks about
the same machine as of yore; nor do I hear
that railway signals answer much better, or that
any important steps have been taken to ensure
a proper communication between the guard and
the driver since this old cap was new.

Yet the marvels are marvellous, notwithstanding.
Since this old cap was new, I have torn
down to Brighton by the express in sixty
minutes. I have written a column of close "copy"
in a coupe; I have been swept over the houses
on the Surrey side—a day Asmodeus—and
have seen what the good folks of Lambeth and
Vauxhall have had for dinner. I have seen a
queen making her progress by railway, and
judges going circuit, and coffins going to the
cemetery, and murderers going to be hanged,
likewise per rail. Who takes any account of
these wonders? We are used to them; and was
it not one of the shrewdest remarks made in his
well-known treatise "Stokers and Pokers," by
Sir Francis Head, that when, railways were first
started, cows and sheep and horses used to
scamper away as fast as ever their legs could
carry them, at the mere sound of the advancing
train, whereas, now, you can't get the cows off
the line; and the dappled dobbins wink lazily,
without a whisk of the tail or a lifting of the
hoof, as the four o'clock express screams and
rushes by! New classes of houses and people,
new types of life and character, have sprung up
about railway termini since this old cap was new.
The guard is a character, with not a single
element of the old mail guard in him. He could
not sound a horn if he were paid for it. The
driver, the stoker, are characters. Watch their
steady, anxious faces as they come, "trolling," as I
may call it, into the station. The railway porter
is a character, and seems to have been born in
velveteen, white at the seams, and to have a hand
curved specially, and turned backwards from his
wrist, for the reception of surreptitious
sixpences. The newspaper boy at the railway
station, with his rapid shuffle, keeping pace with
the moving train, his astonishing shrill slurring
of the names of newspapers, such as Saturday
Review into "Sarriew," and All the Year Round
into "Arryeound;" his arms, which must
possess a preternatural faculty of elongation,
and so reach to the furthermost recesses of
carriages from the off window; and his mouth, which
appears to contain an inexhaustible supply of
small change; this curious, red-comfortered,
sharp-spoken youth resembles no other boy that
I can remember when this old cap was new. The
young lady in the refreshment room is not in the
least like the tavern or hotel barmaid; and who
will tell me that railway tea or railway soup bears
the remotest assimilation to the refreshments
under those titles obtained elsewhere? There is
something, too, about the whiskers of a station-
master, of which the world was not aware when
this old cap was new. The odd little streets of
low-browed, feverish brick houses, the railway
hotels, railway coffee-houses and reading-rooms,
that are circumjacent to the termini, have all a
peculiar stamp and. significance about them.
Even railway vans and railway trucks are not the
things we recollect long years ago. And yet
people used to have vans and trucks, even then.

If you will take any one well-frequented,
prosperous street in this metropolis, and ponder
and be patient a little, a flood of things, quite