A Walk from London to John OGroats | Page 3

lane of low shops for the sale of
junk, beer, onions, shrimps, and cabbages, will run a third of a mile by
your side for the sake of your company. The wickedest boys in the
town hoot at you, with most ignominious and satiric antics, as you pass;
and if they do not shie stones in upon you, or dead cats, it is more from
fear of the beadle or the constable than out of respect for your business
or pleasure.
Indeed, every town and village, great or small, which you pass through
or near on the railway, looks as if you came fifty years before you were
expected. It says, in all the legible expressions of its countenance,
"Lack-a-day!--if here isn't that creature come already, and looking in at
my back door before I had time to turn around, or put anything in
shape!" The Iron Horse himself gets no sympathy nor humane
admiration. He stands grim and wrathy, when reined up for two
minutes and forty-five seconds at a station. No venturesome boys pat
him on the flanks, or look kindly into his eyes, or say a pleasant word
to him, or even wonder if he is tired, or thirsty, or hungry. None of the
ostlers of the greasy stables, in which the locomotives are housed, ever
call him Dobbin, or Old Jack, or Jenny, or say, "Well done, old
fellow!" when they unhitch him from the train at midnight, after a
journey of a hundred leagues. His driver is a real man of flesh and
blood; with wife and children whom he loves. He goes on Sunday to
church, and, maybe, sings the psalms of David, and listens devoutly to
the sermon, and says prayers at home, and the few who know him
speak well of him, as a good and proper man in his way. But, spurred
and mounted upon the saddle of the great iron hexiped, nearly all the
passengers regard him as a part of the beast. No one speaks to him, or
thinks of him on the journey. He may pull up at fifty stations, and not a
soul among the Firsts, Seconds, or even Thirds, will offer him a glass
of beer, or pipe-full of tobacco, or give him a sixpence at the end of the
ride for extra speed or care. His face is grimy, and greasy, and black.
All his motions are ambiguous and awkward to the casual observer. He
has none of the sedate and conscious dignity of his predecessor on the
old stage-coach box. He handles no whip, like him, with easy grace.
Indeed, in putting up his great beast to its best speed, he "hides his whip
in the manger," according to a proverb older than steam power. He

wears no gloves in the coldest weather; not always a coat, and never a
decent one, at his work. He blows no cheery music out of a brass bugle
as he approaches a town, but pricks the loins of the fiery beast, and
makes him scream with a sound between a human whistle and an
alligator's croak. He never pulls up abreast of the station-house door, in
the fashion of the old coach driver, to show off himself and his leaders,
but runs on several rods ahead of his passengers and spectators, as if to
be clear of them and their comments, good or bad. At the end of the
journey, be it at midnight or day-break, not a man nor a woman he has
driven safely at the rate of forty miles an hour thinks or cares what
becomes of him, or separates him in thought from the great iron
monster he mounts. Not the smock-frocked man, getting out of the
forwardmost Third, with his stick and bundle, thinks of him, or stops a
moment to see him back out and turn into the stable.
With all the practical advantages of this machine propulsion at bird
speed over space, it confounds and swallows up the poetical aspects
and picturesque sceneries that were the charm of old-fashioned
travelling in the country. The most beautiful landscapes rotate around a
locomotive axis confusedly. Green pastures and yellow wheat fields are
in a whirl. Tall and venerable trees get into the wake of the same
motion, and the large, pied cows ruminating in their shade, seem to lie
on the revolving arc of an indefinite circle. The views dissolve before
their best aspect is caught by the eye. The flowers, like Eastern beauties,
can only be seen "half hidden and half revealed," in the general
unsteadiness. As for bees, you cannot hear or see them at all; and the
songs of the happiest birds are drowned altogether by the clatter of a
hundred wheels on the metal track. If there are any