FIRE AND SNOW.

Can this be the region of cinders and
coal-dust, which we have traversed before now,
divers times, both by night and by day, when
the dirty wind rattled as it came against us
charged with fine particles of coal, and the
natural colour of the earth and all its vegetation
might have been black, for anything
our eyes could see to the contrary in a waste
of many miles?   Indeed it is the same
country, though so altered that on this
present day when the old year is near its
last, the North East wind blows white, and
all the ground is white—pure white —insomuch
that if our lives depended on our identifying
a mound of ashes as we jar along this
Birmingham and Wolverhampton Railway,
we could not find a handful.

The sun shines brightly, though it is a cold
cold sun, this piercing day; and when the
Birmingham tunnel disgorges us into the
frosty air, we find the pointsman housed in
no mere box, but in a resplendent pavilion,
all bejewelled with dazzling icicles, the least
a yard long. A radiant pointsman he should
be, we think, invested by fairies with a dress
of rainbow hues, and going round and round
in some gorgeously playful manner on a gold
and silver pivot. But, he has changed neither
his stout great coat, nor his stiff hat, nor his
stiff attitude of watch; and as (like the ghostly
dagger of Macbeth) he marshals us the way
that we were going, we observe him to be a
mortal with a red face —red, in part from a
seasonable joviality of spirit, and in part from
frost and wind —with the encrusted snow
dropping silently off his outstretched arm.

Redder than ever are the very red-brick
little houses outside Birmingham —all staring
at the railway in the snowy weather, like
plethoric old men with white heads. Clean
linen drying in yards seems ill-washed, against
the intense white of the landscape. Far and
near, the tall tall chimneys look out over one
another's shoulders for the swart ashes
familiar to them, and can discern nothing
but snow. Is this the smoke of other chimneys
setting in so heavily from the north-east,
and overclouding the short brightness
of the day?  No.  By the North Pole it is
more snow!

Making directly at us, and flying almost
horizontally before the wind, it rushes against
the train, in a dark blast profusely speckled
as it were with drifting white feathers. A
sharp collision, though a harmless one! No
wonder that the engine seems to have a
fearful cold in his head. No wonder, with
a deal of out-door work in such a winter, that
he is very hoarse and very short of breath,
very much blown when we come to the next
station, and very much given to weeping,
snorting and spitting, all the time he stops!

Which is short enough, for these little
upstairs stations at the tops of high arches,
whence we almost look down the chimneys of
scattered workshops, and quite inhale their
smoke as it comes puffing at us —these little
upstairs stations rarely seem to do much
business anywhere, and just now are like
suicidal heights to dive from into depths of
snow. So, away again over the moor, where
the clanking serpents usually writhing above
coal-pits, are dormant and whitened over
— this being holiday time —but where those
grave monsters, the blast-furnaces, which
cannot stoop to recreation, are awake and roaring.
Now, a smoky village; now, a chimney;
now, a dormant serpent who seems to have
been benumbed in the act of working his
way for shelter into the lonely little engine-house
by the pit's mouth; now, a pond with
black specks sliding and skating; now, a drift
with similar specks half sunken in it throwing
snowballs; now, a cold white altar of snow
with fire blazing on it; now, a dreary open
space of mound and fell, snowed smoothly
over, and closed in at last by sullen cities of
chimneys. Not altogether agreeable to think
of crossing such space without a guide, and
being swallowed by a long-abandoned,
long-forgotten shaft. Not even agreeable, in this
undermined country, to think of half-a-dozen
railway arches with the train upon them,
suddenly vanishing through the snow into
the excavated depths of a coal-forest.

Snow, wind, ice, and Wolverhampton —all
together. No carriage at the station, everything
snowed up. So much the better. The
Swan will take us under its warm wing,
walking or riding. Where is the Swanks
nest? In the market-place. So much the
better yet, for it is market-day, and there will
be something to see from the Swan's nest.

Up the streets of Wolverhampton, where