"Why, I remember, sir, when I was a boy,
being three days and nights on a journey that
you do now in four hours. Those were the
times; no hurry-scurry, helter-skelter—no
chopping up decent people with trains, and
no gambling shares, and rascally sharemarket,
with all the bullying and overbearing
you hear of."

That is the old gentleman's ideal of railway-
poetry.

None of these, I am afraid, would listen to
me were I to say I saw poetry in a stoker's
life. On rough days, for instance, when he
cowers behind his screen of spectacle, and
looks out long and steadily through the sand
and mist.

He is no divinity, bless you, no! Lord
bless you! Nor no Diomed nor Hector, but
Jack Watford, of Number four, Blue Anchor.
He knows every crimson star that shines at
stations, and every emerald fire, and every
white circle and red globe that stare at you
for a hundred miles of line. He grasps that
handle there, when the great wind blows
enough to lift the train in the air like a
feather, only it doesn't. Firm he holds that
helm on those noisy nights, and drives his
strong, swift steam-ship on its naming path,
scattering the red-hot ashes of its rage as it
ploughs on. And when the rain drives its
liquid arrows at him, he only wipes his great
eyeglass, and looks out a-head, or screws the
engine up till it gives a long startling shriek
of pain, that wakes up the sleepers in the
next town, and makes them mutter, and
turn again to sleep.

Another generation, and the sense of
novelty and poetry will have left railroads
for ever. The long tearful stare of wonder
as the train grows small as a fly, or a black
caterpiller in the distance will be no more
observed.

The sight of a train growing out of a cloud
of smoke, the terror of its march, and the
rumour and battling of its rush, will have
grown as familiar as the careening and
rumble of the Royal Blue, bound to 'Ornsey
or 'Ighgate. The instantaneousness, the
obedient readiness of a train, already seem
things of course. The propulsion of lightning,
the comet speed, the strange contrast,
of such spiritual power controlled by a black
fellow in fustian, Caliban ruling Ariel, is
never thought of by such turtle-eating
materialists, so grossly sunk in dirty three per
cents are we. How many steps must we go
back before we can return to our childish
wonder at the crimson drop in a cowslip-cup,
at a dark green fairy ring, or the dead
men's flesh that has turned to mushrooms.
As for Dryads, you can still hear their
voices in windy nights, even in Kensington
Gardens,—when the rooks caw restlessly
in their sleep, as if a worm had
turned cold on their stomachs, and when the
black leaves of Hyde Park elms flutter and
talk of what they shall do in the merry
autumn time, when they once get loose from
their governors, and start in life on their
own account, these young things, not believing
in winter,  — not they.

What do we believe in? Look you here,
friend, great on 'Change, —three weeks
hence, you'll drop down at the Mansion
House turtle-feast, and the alderman next
you absorbed in green fat will not observe
you taken out when he calls for a
clean plate and a cold chair, to give him a
zest for his sixth course. You will soon
after, when a certain gentleman shakes his
head, turn thin, and in fact die. A week
later, after a week's silence in a room with
the blind down, you will be carried out after
a jostle down stairs to that dull Kensington
churchyard, where an epitaph recording
your mayoralties is already cut, to put over
your head. Of what use, then, the snug
detached villa, the crusty port, and the natty
phaeton—olive green picked out with white
—Answer, fool, of what use?

Had it not been better to have done good,
and been kindly and open-hearted, and to
have seen some poetry in life, and not called
the air blue fog, and the rose a vegetable?
Why, if that railway whistle could have
been interpreted to you by an angel, you
might have known that it had a meaning
prophetic and dreadful as the Judgment
trumpet. That nettle your Malacca cane
cut in two yesterday was a beautiful thing
God made. No, man! 'Change is not the
end of life, and gold is not the old road-dust
of Eden, and by no means the thing
Apollyon lost Heaven for. Wake up, then!
unlock your cellar, send a dozen of port
to poor old Binns, the poor old head-clerk,
who is so weak and threadbare. Release
the orphan from Chancery, and do
something for the widow's son you ruined,—
above all, look reverently henceforth at all
stokers and all humanity, and peace be with
you.

A JOURNEY DUE NORTH.

HIGH JINKS AT CHRISTOFFSKY.

PERHAPS Xhristovskoï—perhaps Cristofski;
but, that it is an island in the Neva, and that
there are high jinks there, I know. When
the lexicological and harmonic value of the
thirty-six letters in the Russian alphabet
shall find a compensating equivalent, and shall
be adequately represented by the poverty-
stricken twenty-six we Western barbarians
possess, I shall be able I hope to get on better
with my Sclavonic orthography; and philologists
will cease to gird at me for not spelling
correctly, words for which there is no definite
rule correctly to spell—will cease to denounce
me for violating the law, when that law is yet
a Lex non scripta.

This is the twenty-first of June—old, or
Russian style; and Saint John's Day—
Midsummer, in fact. Even as the little boys in