gold-rimmed pebbles, as though the matrix
they (the letters) had descended from had
been a maniac; and they, in consequence, mad
type, wholly unsuitable for so grave a work as
The Architectural Psychology of the Middle
Ages as Exhibited in Flying Buttresses, which
the pale gentleman essayed to peruse but
gave up at last in despair.

Another traveller, a political-looking man
with grey whiskers and a determined neckcloth
—the sort of man, I warrant, who looks
sharply after the member for his borough,
and heads a requisition to him to resign
his seat two or three times in the course
of a session—tried also to read a leader
in that day's Times; but, in spite of the
large, bold type, and of his folding the paper
into a small, fierce compass, and holding it
with both hands, with a paper-knife pressed
over the line immediately below the one he
read, and so moved downwards, and nearly
gluing his eyes to it in the bargain; in spite
of this he had no better success; and muttering
"Unprincipled print " (doubtless because
he couldn't read it), went austerely to sleep,
and dreamed, probably, of the brisk rubbing
up he will give the honourable member for
Throttlebury, shortly, concerning his infamous
tergiversation about that poor burked little
bill which was to have given sewers to
Throttlebury. A commercial gentleman, with
his great coat full of gold pencil-cases, vainly
attempted at Rugby to jot down an order in
his note-book, and failing to make anything
but incoherent zig-zag diagrams, bound a
railway rug round his head till it assumed
the semblance of a grenadier's cap that had
been stencilled at a paper-stainer's, and went
to sleep, too. Somebody (I hope he didn't
sit near me), not being able to read, or to
sleep, or to snore and gasp and bark like the
ball of something with a wide-awake hat in
the left-hand off corner, and afraid to sing,
presumed to smoke, swallowing the major
part of the fumes through modesty, and
tilting the ashes cautiously out of the little
Venetian jalousies above the window.

We all got out at Wolverton, where the
commercial traveller disappeared—perhaps to
take an order for pork pies; and the pale
gentleman in spectacles was indignant (and
justly so, I think), that he could not have
threepenn'orth of brandy in his tea. So,
through the black night have we rushed
fiercely through black county after county.
At Stafford, the ball of something (which has
turned out to be camlet cloak), speaking for
the first and last time, has remarked that " it
is a long train " (which it is not). At some
intermediate station—whose name, as it was
yelped forth by a porter as he hurried by
thrusting grease into the hot greedy maw of
the axle-box, might just as well have been
cried in Chaldee or Sanscrit for anything I
could make of it a—simpering gentleman with
a gold chain peeping even from among his
many coats, and a Fez cap, proposed to enter
the carriage; but, drawing back, declared
that " somebody had been smoking," and that
it was a " disgwace;" whereupon the guard
asked nobody in particular if anybody had
been smoking; and, seeming perfectly satisfied
with the assurance that nobody had, remarked
that "it was the engine—may be," and
popped my simpering gentleman into the
next carriage, in which there were two old
maids, one purple satin lady of Lambertian.
or Armitagian bulk, a young child (querulous),
a black nurse, and a gentleman subject to
fits—having them, too, every other station or
so. No smoking there!

Far behind lies Crewe, though but a minute
passed. I draw down the window, and the
keen morning breeze charges in at the aperture
like a Cossack. And in the eastern
horizon day breaks. How many cocks, I
wonder, in all the lands day breaks upon are
singing their morning hymn now? I listen
for one Chanticleer; but the engine "has a
crow of its own, and a yell for going into
tunnels, and a howl for coming out of them,
and hideous noises for all seasons and every
inch of the road. All the cocks in Lancashire
might crow themselves hoarse ere I could
hear them amid this din.

Day breaks fast, and the slender grey
thread expands into a wide sheet of pale
light. Against it the coldly violet clouds are
defined in sharp and rigid relief. These are
the fragments of the veil of night yielding
slowly, and, as it were, reluctantly to
daylight. Slower and slower, almost
imperceptibly, as day gains on night, one great
bank of cloud sinks in nearly a horizontal
line into Erebus, like a pair of flats in a
theatrical spectacle; but the side pieces of
clouds—the wings and set pieces, if I may
call them so—split up into jagged, obstinate,
refractory cloudlets over the sky, which, by
this time has turned from ashy pallid grey to
silver blue—not sky-blue, as we generally
understand it, yet—but a blue like that we
see in the shadow part of silver lace. These
clouds are of fantastic shapes: some are dark
slices, long, and almost mathematically
straight; others torn and zig-zag shaped;
some take the semblance of fiendish heads
and hideous animals with more legs than were
ever dreamt of in the philosophy of Buffon or
Cuvier. Fast as the day breaks, and broad
daylight as it is by this time, the genial,
warming influence of the blessed sun is yet
wanting. The guests are bidden and the
banquet is spread; but the bride and bride-
groom are not come home from church
yet. The contract is drawn up, but lacks
the signature. The pyre is heaped up and
needs only one friendly torch to set it in a
blaze.

Coldly garish yet is the white, sunless day.
Funereally black and dismal loom tufted
masses of tall trees—their umbrageous mantles
chequered here and there by diamond flashes
of the sunlight coming up behind them. Coldly