Review said about steam. Somehow, the
world hath wagged considerably since then,
and the prediction of the merry fellow has
been, like a great many other jovial prophecies,
considerably more than accomplished. The
railway gridiron not only spreads itself over
the map; but innumerable little auxiliary
bars, called branch lines, continue to intersect
it; so that the gridiron assumes, day by
day, more the aspect of -- what shall I say? --
a sheet of paper on which a centipede, his
hundred legs well dipped in ink, has been
executing a cheerful hornpipe. Am I
exaggerating? I call witnesses to disprove the
assertion: Bradshaw's railway guide, nay, the very
stones of the Whistleby station, which as all
men know is on the Whistleby, Slocumb, and
Dumbledowndeary branch of the East Appleshire
line, a succursal of the great Nornoreastern
trunk line. At this station I find
myself one Sunday evening provided with a
return ticket from Whistleby to Babylon
Bridge. The up train -- so a porter in a full
suit of velveteen, well oiled, tells me -- will be
due in twenty minutes. The evening being
fine, I see no reason why I should not take a
stroll "cross country."

This cross country is not strange to me;
for, when I was a dweller in the tents of that
Dumbledowndeary of which I have already
been bold enough to speak, I frequently
wandered from thence to Whistleby, and from
Whistleby through that cross country which
includes in its circuit, two or three villages,
and many farms. Whither shall my walk
be now? Two miles away, along green lanes,
running between orchards and at the foot of
a hill, in a hollow so deep as to be almost
like a pit, lies Codlingford. A lovely little
village it is, though unhealthy through its
situation -- so unhealthy, indeed, that it was
decimated by the cholera, till the frightened
villagers rolled blazing tar-barrels down
the steep street to drive the maleficent
vapours away. Not hither will I walk now,
however; for two great silk-printing factories,
with tier above tier of windows in distressing
regularity, mar the otherwise charming
landscape: tall chimneys tower over the
pent-house roofs and swinging inn signs; and
streams of indigo and cochineal discolour the
once pellucid creek, where I know of several
trout, and have some suspicion of perch, even.
Not Codlingford-wise, through which the
great Dover road runs, and through which it
is traditionally reported that seventy stage
coaches (when there were coaches), passed
every day, will I bend my steps; nor shall my
walk be to Crabapple Heath, an inland
Dumbledowndeary in miniature, whose inhabitants
have run mad on the subject of shops, as those
of Dumbledowndeary have upon houses, and
have erected Imperial tea warehouses; and
"Saloons of Fashion " and Pantechnicons of
wearing apparel, and Berlin wool establishments
amid the gorse and furze, and almost
as "unprofitably gay;" when, goodness knows
the one "everything shop" of the village, whose
proprietor dispensed linendrapery, sweet-stuff,
ironmongery, Leghorn bonnets, patent medicines,
boots and shoes, and cheap periodicals,
with equal impartiality, was quite enough for
their simple requirements. The Crabappleians
wait for customers, as do the Dumbledowndearians
for tenants. Neither will I wend my
steps to the church, a grey old building, with
a leaden steeple charmingly out of the
perpendicular, whose rusted weathercock, all on one
side, gazes with a sort of sleepy astonishment
at the bran-new railway, running close by,
and the little railway cottage in Kentish
ragstone, where a railway employé passes his
time between whistling, smoking, and warning
off the line any stray bullock, which in the
absorbing gravity of cud-chewing might
otherwise stare an express train in the face,
and be thereby converted into premature
beef. This church is well worth visiting,
though I have not time to tarry there to-day.
Mr. Gray might have composed his Elegy in
the green churchyard, where the " rude
forefathers of the hamlet sleep;" or in the church
where painstaking churchwardens have
covered rich oak carvings, and stone pilasters,
and fretted roof, with one unvarying coat of
whitewash -- and would, I dare say, had they
had their way, have whitewashed the great
squire's pew, with its somnolent crimson-
covered hassocks and cushions, its corpulent
prayer-books and Bibles, giving an additional
coat of priming to the stone tablets erected
to worthies who flourished two hundred
year ago, the monumental brasses telling of
mitred abbots and signet-ringed priors, in the
days when matins and complins were sung in
Dumbledowndeary church, and rich copes
and dalmatics hung in the little vestry
instead of the parson's plain gown and surplice,
flanked by the " Churchman's Almanack,"
a paper relating to assessed taxes, a box of
lucifers, and the clerk's snuff-box. Mr. Gray,
I say, might have meditated on the tombs of
a succession of village magnates, "Lords of
this Manor of Codlingford," or on the great
altar-tomb where some pious dame of the
olden time lies in marble, her hands piously
joined, and her feet resting on a little dog;
or, haply, he might have strolled into the
belfry, where hang the frayed and faded
bell-ropes, and where a gaily-emblazoned
board, like a cheerful hatchment, tells of the
achievements of the Rochester "youths" in
the year of grace, 1730, how many bob majors
they rang, and how Jesse Cotes was tenor.
He might have moralised on the little gap
(like a grave) under the gallery stairs, where
the tressels and coil of ropes lie; he might have
filled the pulpit with crowds of mind-pictured
preachers: shaven friars, cowled penitents,
and stoled bishops; Episcopalians with beard
and moustache; crop-eared Presbyterians
in Geneva band, beating the drum ecclesiastic;
red-coated Independents, with Bible
in one hand and broadsword in the other;