who may be curates or schoolmasters, and a brown man with a large sea-chest.  At the quarter, the scene thickens; there are few Hansoms, but some night cabs, a vast number of carts of all kinds, from the costermonger’s donkey to the dashing butcher’s Whitechapel.  There is very little medium in parliamentary passengers about luggage, either they have a cart-load or none at all.  Children are very plentiful, and the mothers are accompanied with large escorts of female relations, who keep kissing and stuffing the children with real Gibraltar rock and gingerbread to the last moment.  Every now and then a well-dressed man hurries past into the booking-office and takes his ticket with a sheepish air as if he was pawning his watch.  Sailors arrive with their chests and hammocks.  The other day we had the pleasure of meeting a travelling tinker with the instruments of his craft neatly packed; two gentlemen, whose closely cropped hair and pale plump complexion betokened a recent residence in some gaol or philanthropic institution; an economical baronet, of large fortune; a prize fighter, going down to arrange a little affair which was to come off the next day; a half-pay officer, with a genteel wife and twelve children, on his way to a cheap county in the north; a party of seven Irish, father, mother, and five grown-up sons and daughters, on their way to America, after a successful residence in London; a tall young woman and a little man, from Stamford, who had been up to London to buy stone bottles, and carried them back rattling in a box; a handsome dragoon, with a very pretty girl,—her eyes full of tears,—on his arm, to see him off; another female was waiting at the door for the same purpose, when the dragoon bolted, and took refuge in the interior of the station.  In a word, a parliamentary train collects,—besides mechanics in search of work, sailors going to join a ship, and soldiers on furlough,—all whose necessities or tastes lead them to travel economically, among which last class are to be found a good many Quakers.  It is pleasing to observe the attention the poor women, with large families and piles of packages, receive from the officers of the company, a great contrast to the neglect which meets the poorly clad in stage-coach travelling, as may still be seen in those districts where the rail has not yet made way.

We cannot say that we exactly admire the taste of the three baronets whom a railway superintendent found in one third-class carriage, but we must own that to those to whom economy is really an object, there is much worse travelling than by the Parliamentary.  Having on one occasion gone down by first-class, with an Oxford man who had just taken his M.A., an ensign of infantry in his first uniform, a clerk in Somerset House, and a Manchester man who had been visiting a Whig Lord,—and returned third-class, with a tinker, a sailor just returned from Africa, a bird-catcher with his load, and a gentleman in velveteens, rather greasy, who seemed, probably on a private mission, to have visited the misdemeanour wards of all the prisons in England and Scotland; we preferred the return trip, that is to say, vulgar and amusing to dull and genteel.  Among other pieces of information gleaned on this occasion, we learned that “for a cove as didn’t mine a jolly lot of readin and writin, Readin was prime in winter; plenty of good vittles, and the cells warmed.”

It must be remarked that the character of the Parliamentary varies very much according to the station from which it starts.  The London trains being the worst, having a large proportion of what are vulgarly called “swells out of luck.”  In a rural district the gathering of smock-frocks and rosy-faced lasses, the rumbling of carts, and the size, number, and shape of the trunks and parcels, afford a very agreeable and comical scene on a frosty, moonlight, winter’s morning, about Christmas time, when visiting commences, or at Whitsuntide.  No man who has a taste for studying the phases of life and character should fail to travel at least once by the Parliamentary.

The large cheap load having rumbled off from the south side of the station, about nine o’clock preparations are commenced for the aristocratic Express, which, on this line, is composed of first-class carriages alone, in which, at half the price of the old mail coach fares, the principal stations on the line are reached at railway speed.

To attend the departure of this train, there arrive not only the republican omnibi and cabs, from the damp night crawler to the rattling Hansom, but carriages, with coronets and mitres emblazoned, guarded by the tallest and most obsequious of footmen, and driven by the fattest and most lordly of coachmen; also the neatest of broughams, adorned internally with pale pink and blue butterfly bonnets; dashing dogcarts, with neat grooms behind, mustached guardsmen driving; and stately cabriolets prance in, under the guidance of fresh primrose-coloured gloves.

But, although the passengers by the Express train are, in every respect, a contrast to those by the Parliamentary, the universal and levelling tendency of the railway system is not less plainly exhibited.

The earl or duke, whose dignity formerly compelled him to post in a coupé and four, at a cost of some five or six shillings a mile, and an immense consumption of horse-flesh, wax-lights, and landladies’ curtsies on the road, now takes his place unnoticed in a first-class carriage next to a gentleman who travels for a great claret and champagne house, and opposite another going down express to report a railway meeting at Birmingham for a morning paper.  If you see a lady carefully and courteously escorted to a carriage marked “engaged,” on a blackboard, it is probably not a countess but the wife of one of the principal officers of the company.  A bishop in a greatcoat creates no sensation; but a tremendous rush of porters and superintendents towards one carriage, announces that a director or well-known engineer is about to take his seat.  In fact, civility to all, gentle and simple, is the rule introduced by the English railway system; every porter with a number on his coat is, for the time, the passenger’s servant.  Special attention is bestowed on those who are personally known, and no one can grumble at that.  Some people, who have never visited the continent, or only visited it for pleasure, travelling at their leisure, make comparisons with the railways of France and Germany, unfavourable to the English system.  Our railways are dearer than the foreign, so is our government,—we make both ourselves; but compare the military system of the continental railways; the quarter of an hour for admission before the starting of the train, during which, if too early or too late, you are locked out; the weighing of every piece of baggage; the lordly commanding airs of all the officials if any relaxation of rules be required; the insouciance with which the few porters move about, leaving ladies and gentlemen to drag their own luggage;—compare all this with the rapid manner in which the loads of half-a-dozen cabs, driving up from some other railway at the last moment, are transferred to the departing Express; compare the speed, the universal civility, attention, and honesty, that distinguish our railway travelling, and you cannot fail to come to the conclusion that for a commercial people to whom time is of value, ours is the best article, and if we had not been a lawyer-ridden people we might also have had the cheapest article.

Before starting the Express train, we must not fail to note one new class of passengers, recruited by the speed of railways, viz., the number of gentlemen in breeches, boots, and spurs, with their pinks just peeping from under their rough jackets, who, during the season, get down to Aylesbury, Bletchley, and even Wolverton, to hunt, and back home again to dinner.  But the signal sounds.  The express train moves off; two gentlemen at the last moment are, in vain, crying out for Punch and the