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 al