aster and servant sleep heads
and points on the cabin floor of the steamer, feed at the same table, sit
in each other's laps, as it were, in the cars; and all this for the sake
of doing very uncomfortably in two days what would be done delightfully
in eight or ten. Shall we be much longer kept by this toilsome fashion
of hurrying, hurrying, from starting (those who can afford it) on a
journey with our own horses, and moving slowly, surely, and profitably
through the country, with the power of enjoying its beauty, and be the
means of creating good inns. Undoubtedly, a line of post-horses and
post-chaises would long ago have been established along our great roads
had not steam monopolized everything. . . . Talk of ladies on board a
steamboat or in a railroad car. There are none! I never feel like a
gentleman there, and I cannot perceive a semblance of gentility in any
one who makes part of the travelling mob. When I see women whom, in
their drawing rooms or elsewhere, I have been accustomed to respect and
treat with every suitable deference--when I see them, I say, elbowing
their way through a crowd of dirty emigrants or lowbred homespun fellows
in petticoats or breeches in our country, in order to reach a table
spread for a hundred or more, I lose sight of their pretensions to
gentility and view them as belonging to the plebeian herd. To restore
herself to her caste, let a lady move in select company at five miles an
hour, and take her meals in comfort at a good inn, where she may dine
decently. . . . After all, the old-fashioned way of five or six miles,
with liberty to dine in a decent inn and be master of one's movements,
with the delight of seeing the country and getting along rationally, is
the mode to which I cling, and which will be adopted again by the
generations of after times."

--_Recollections of Samuel Breck_.

APPEALING TO THE CLERGY.

Mr. C. F. Adams remarks:--"During the periods of discouragement which, a
few years later, marked certain stages of the construction of the Western
road, connecting Worcester with Albany--when both money and courage
seemed almost exhausted--Mr. De Grand never for a moment faltered. He
might almost be said to have then had Western railroad on the brain.
Among other things, he issued a circular which caused much amusement and
not improbably some scandal among the more precise. The Rev. S. K.
Lothrop, then a young man,