le;
and you, yourself, with a feeling of dignity which you cannot altogether
conceal, sally forth to the booking-office to secure your place. Here a
painful consciousness of your own unimportance first rushes on your
mind--the people are as cool and collected as if nobody were going out of
town, or as if a journey of a hundred odd miles were a mere nothing. You
enter a mouldy-looking room, ornamented with large posting-bills; the
greater part of the place enclosed behind a huge, lumbering, rough
counter, and fitted up with recesses that look like the dens of the
smaller animals in a travelling menagerie, without the bars. Some
half-dozen people are 'booking' brown-paper parcels, which one of the
clerks flings into the aforesaid recesses with an air of recklessness
which you, remembering the new carpet-bag you bought in the morning, feel
considerably annoyed at; porters, looking like so many Atlases, keep
rushing in and out, with large packages on their shoulders; and while you
are waiting to make the necessary inquiries, you wonder what on earth the
booking-office clerks can have been before they were booking-office
clerks; one of them with his pen behind his ear, and his hands behind
him, is standing in front of the fire, like a full-length portrait of
Napoleon; the other with his hat half off his head, enters the
passengers' names in the books with a coolness which is inexpressibly
provoking; and the villain whistles--actually whistles--while a man asks
him what the fare is outside, all the way to Holyhead!--in frosty
weather, too! They are clearly an isolated race, evidently possessing no
sympathies or feelings in common with the rest of mankind. Your turn
comes at last, and having paid the fare, you tremblingly inquire--'What
time will it be necessary for me to be here in the morning?'--'Six
o'clock,' replies the whistler, carelessly pitching the sovereign you
have just parted with, into a wooden bowl on the desk. 'Rather before
than arter,' adds the man with the semi-roasted unmentionables, with just
as much ease and complacency as if the whole world got out of bed at
five. You turn into the street, ruminating as you bend your steps
homewards on the extent to which men become hardened in cruelty, by
custom.

If there be one thing in existence more miserable than another, it most
unquestionably is the being compelled to rise by candlelight. If you
have ever doubted the fact, you are painfully convinced of yo