brought upon us by
the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the
loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day,--whether
indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as
to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the common
daily flattery on which the power of the British press first depends, I
cannot judge;--but, for one or other of such motives, I saw lately in some
illustrated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fashioned and modern
travel, representing, as the type of things passed away, the outside
passengers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent distress from the
swirl of a winter snowstorm; and for type of the present Elysian
dispensation, the inside of a first-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful
young lady in the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing,
Daily news in hand, with a young officer--her fortunate vis-a-vis--on the
subject of our military successes in Afghanistan and Zululand.[24]

3. I will not, in presenting--it must not be called the other side, but the
supplementary, and wilfully omitted, facts, of this ideal,--oppose, as I
fairly might, the discomforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the
chariot-and-four, with outriders and courier, of ancient noblesse. I will
compare only the actual facts, in the former and in latter years, of my own
journey from Paris to Geneva. As matters are now arranged, I find myself,
at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused crowd with which I
am presently to contend for a seat, in the dim light and cigar-stench of
the great station of the Lyons line. Making slow way through the
hostilities of the platform, in partly real, partly weak politeness, as may
be, I find the corner seats of course already full of prohibitory cloaks
and umbrellas; but manage to get a middle back one; the net overhead is
already surcharged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I squeeze my
desk as well as I can between my legs, and arrange what wraps I have about
my knees and shoulders. Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with
nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under
the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or
less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and
encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing
themselves for sleep: the last arrangement f