A Walk from London to John OGroats | Page 3

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 poor, flat, or fen lands, your way is sure to lie through them. In a picturesque and undulating country, studded with parks and mansions of wealth and taste, you are plunging through a long, dark tunnel, or walled into a deep cut, before your eye can catch the view that dashes by your carriage window. If you have a