to receive us, and with a wild shriek of
the steam whistle, we are again in utter
darkness. I do not feel my hat battered in,
and I therefore conclude that the round
shoulders have received no injury. I can
pardon the imagination for performing any
freak, while the body is careering through
such a place. Where are we ? Where are
we hurrying to? Are we in a main sewer,
or a dark passage leading fathoms deep under
the sea? Is that rushing, hissing sound the
cry of the great waters as they pass us in
headlong fury on either side, full of strange
and novel life; full of prickly star-fish, and
dull-eyed, large-mouthed fishy monsters; full
of a wondrous net-work of animal vegetables,
and vegetable animals; and do I, with a
sense of suffocation, resign myself to the
embraces of the clasping polypi? Should I be
astonished at a merman asking for tickets?
Certainly not; nor should I be astonished at
seeing a lurid glare coming from half-opened
iron doors across the darkness, and agonised,
hard-featured, red-faced men, standing to
give a grim welcome to the awful realms
of —

I look out a-head, against the whirlwind,
and in the far distance I see a small light
yellow disk, the termination of the tunnel,
which appears like a full moon resting on the
waters. As we advance, the sides of the
tunnel glisten with a faint light, and I appear
to be flying through a gigantic telescope.

The scene changes again, and the yellow
circle at the end becomes as the reflected
disk of the large microscope at the Poly-
technic. Two specks pass across the circle,
like the insects in a drop of water; they are
railway labourers crossing the mouth of the
tunnel. The disk becomes larger, and the
outlines of country are seen through the
blue mist. They increase in distinctness, and
the colours fill themselves in, one by one,
until the whole stands revealed as a perfect
landscape, into the midst of which we are
suddenly shot, as if from the mouth of a
cannon.

On we go, out of the sun-light into the
mist, and again out of the mist into the sun-
light; past undulating parks, rich with the
red-brown trees of autumn; past quiet pools
and churches in among the hills; past
solitary signal-men, and side stations, where
weary engines rest from their labours; past
hurrying down-trains with a crash and a
whirl; and at last through arches, in amongst
the crowd of trains, each making for the
London terminus. Then come the churches
and chimneys, the line of docks and houses,
the market-gardens, the tan-yards, and on
the line, the signal-houses, the coloured
semaphore arms, extended like the variegated sails
of a windmill; the men waving red and
green flags, as if in honour of our approach;
the other men, standing motionless, with
projecting arms, like raw recruits under
exercise, or a mesmeric patient in a state of
catalepsy; the disks hanging like enormous
pairs of spectacles across bare poles; the
ringing of bells, the crowd of people, the final
whistle of the engine, and grinding screech
of the train.

My trip has been short, but it has shown
me something of the organisation of a railway;
and the order, regularity, care,
vigilance, and subordinate habits of the officials.
When our evening train in future is ten
minutes late at the Claypool Station, and
Mrs. Contributor hinted that the dinner
is again getting cold, I shall not write an
indignant letter to the Times, but I shall say
to her in my blandest tones, " Better late
than never, my dear. I might have been
punctual to a minute; but as there was
danger on the line, I am sure you would
rather have the mutton spoiled, than have
me brought up the lane on a stretcher, with
my lever watch beaten several inches deep
into my ribs, and my usually handsome
countenance in such a state that it would
frighten the baby."

THE SUN-HORSE.

WE often make a great blunder when,
snatching up an old fairy-tale book,
haphazard, we fancy we can revive those
pleasant days of our childhood, in which we
thought that the absence of a supernatural
godmother was a serious defect in modern
christenings; that a gentleman's second wife
was sure to persecute the progeny of the
first, who were (or was) always pretty, and
equally sure to bring into the family an ugly
brat— the result of a former marriage on her
own part— whom she spoiled and petted, less
from motives of affection, than from a desire
to spite all the rest; that where there were
three, or seven children in a household, the
youngest was invariably the shrewdest of the
lot; and that no great and glorious end could
be obtained without overthrowing three
successive obstacles, each more formidable than
the obstacle preceding.

It is not to a vigorous freshness of imagination,
but to a total absence of critical
comparison, that the delight with which a child
will wade through a thick monotonous book
of fairy-tales is to be attributed. In ninety-
nine cases out of a hundred, neither the
imagination that creates the tale, nor the
imagination that is appealed to, is of a very
lofty kind. Ordinary fairy-land, far from
displaying a wide field for the capricious
sports of the fancy, is under laws of the
strictest and most fettering kind. As the
ancient Egyptian sculptors were obliged,
under pain of death, perpetually to execute
the same figure of a man, without being in.
the slightest degree influenced by the individual
peculiarity of the person intended to be
represented, or rather symbolised, so do the
concoctions of fairy-tales all over Europe and
Asia seem compelled to follow certain normal