been made to many members of the
governing class, who now hold positions, and
reside upon the line. There are the Grand
Ranger, the Deputy Grand Ranger, the
Secretary to the Deputy Grand Ranger; the
Lord Marshal, the Under Marshal; the Lord
Steward of the Coke and Coal Department,
the Deputy Lord Steward; the Grease Master,
Deputy Grease Master, and the Keeper
of the Oil Cans. These officers have the
privilege (besides grants of land upon the
line) of running special trains for themselves
and friends, without any formal notice to
his Grace the Governor-General. This
privilege has at present been sparingly
used, and no particular accident has sprung
from it, except the smashing of a ploughman
who was crossing the line, and the running,
on one occasion, through the end wall of the
London terminus, into the middle of the
public road.

The Civil Service Staff of the Great Royal
Deadlock Railway is the pride and glory of
the country. Compare it now, for efficiency
and completeness under Government
superintendence, with what it was in the days of
the late bankrupt Joint-Stock Company.
Every man who enters upon even such
humble positions as stoker, ticket-taker, or
porter, must be able to tell the names of the
Kings and Queens of England, give a scientific
analysis of coal (including the chemistry
of coke), and of the theory of combustion,
and must show some respectable knowledge
of conic sections, trigonometry, and the use
of the theodolite. The principal appointments
are numerous, varied, and complete.
There are fourteen Gentlemen Ushers of
the Great Board Room, and one Assistant
Usher; eight Grooms of the General
Manager's Office, and one Assistant Groom;
fourteen Pages of the Locomotive Department,
and one Assistant Page; one hundred and
fifty Inspectors of Stations, and one Assistant
Inspector; one hundred and fifty Examiners
of Bridges, and one Assistant Examiner; one
hundred and fifty Surveyors of Tunnels, and
one Assistant Surveyor; sixty Regulators of
Refreshment Rooms, and one Assistant
Regulator; ten Hereditary Grand Judges of
Iron Girders, and one Assistant Judge; and
fifty-six Gentlemen Lamplighters, with one
Assistant Gent. The nameless crowd of
minor offices are as numerous in proportion,
and as carefully filled, as the posts of trust
and honour. The system of the Civil Service
is carried into the minutest corners of the
railway, and wherever there is a department
with thirty or forty clerks, there is always to
be found one assistant clerk. Every engine is
manufactured upon the premises, by a body of
workmen, overlooked by another body of
surveyors. The cost of every locomotive is about
double the price usually charged by a regular
manufacturing engineer. To avoid even the
remotest chance of accident by explosions
from over-work, no engine is kept in use
more than three months, and some not even
that small number of weeks. So careful are
the stoker and driver of the passengers' lives,
that where there is the slightest chance of
an accident from the obstinate refusal of a
home-made locomotive engine to move on,
rather than irritate it by a dangerous
pressure of steam, they desert the unruly
one, and the passengers walk with perfect
safety to their destination along the tranquil
and beautifully regulated line.

Such are the railway nightmares that
haunt me, and will not pass away.

             SHERRY.

"TIME flies," says the epicurean idler of
Cadiz, who is fond of proverbs;—"meanwhile,
take a boat."

I obeyed the proverb; and till the Xeres,
or rather Port Saint Mary, steamer was ready
(it was now puffing as if to test the strength
of its lungs), I took a latteen-sailed boat,
and skimmed over the luminous green water,
which washed and rolled like so much tinted
sunlight in the Bay of Cadiz, through which
the red mullet steered and caracolled, like
enchanted fish, laughing to scorn all those
bare-legged fisher-boys, who, with cane rods
at least fourteen feet long, bob for them all
day from the quay-ledges.

I was tired and burnt up with lounging
about among the men in buff-coloured jackets
and black and red scarves round their
waists; with reading the list of voters on
the post-office wall; with cheapening green
figs the dew still on them; with talking to
a Moor who sat on his counter grave as a
Cadi in rhubarb-coloured slippers; with
watching the lazy warehousemen on the
quays throwing up golden red maize into
dry pyramid heaps; and with looking at the
rows of street-songs, all about guerillas and
bull-fighters. So now, abroad on the
delicious light-green water, in the trusty boat
known as La Bella Gaditana, I lay on a seat,
and paddled about my brown hands in the
lukewarm waves that glittered and frothed
about the boat.

There lies Cadiz, that new-built Venice,
with its yellow and rose-coloured palaces, its
tall miradores (watch-towers), where anxious
Antonios sit waiting for the first sight of
their Indian argosies; the flat eastern roofs,
where the Dons repose and smoke and the
Donnas chat and sing; the yellow porcelain
domes, so like mosques; the long, dark
batteries, like sharks' jaws, which are teethed
with cannon; the barracks, and the hospitals.
There they all are, crowding to the seashore
as if to welcome some conqueror. It is a
new and brighter Venice, trooping down to
the strand to welcome some new Columbus
who comes not yet. It is the city that our
Essex sacked; in fact, the city of sack;
that old admirals of ours long since laid in pickle