wing-room, the pale-faced lady was
gone; and, a few days afterwards, the _Morning Post_ announced among
its departures that Miss Seymour had left London for the continent.

THE CONTINENTAL 'BRADSHAW' IN 1852.

Bradshaw's _Continental Railway Guide_--the square, pale-yellow,
compact, brochure which makes its appearance once a month, and which
has doubled its thickness in its brief existence of five years--is
suggestive of a multitude of thoughts concerning the silent revolution
now passing over Europe. Presidents may have _coups d'etat_; kings may
put down parliaments, and emperors abrogate constitutions; Legitimists
may dream of the past, and Communists of the future; but the
_railways_ are marking out a path for themselves in Europe which will
tend to obliterate, or at least to soften, the rugged social barriers
which separate nation from nation. This will not be effected all at
once, and many enthusiasts are disappointed that the cosmopolitanism
advances so slowly; but the result is not the less certain in being
slow.

Our facetious contemporary _Punch_ once gave a railway map of England,
in which the face of the land was covered with intersecting lines at
mutual distances of only a mile or two. A railway map of Europe has
certainly not yet assumed such a labyrinthine character; still, the
lines of civilisation (for so we may well term them) are becoming
closer and closer every year. The outposts of Europe, where the
Scandinavian, the Sclavonian, the Italian, and the Spaniard
respectively rule, are scanty in their exhibition of such lines; but
as we gradually approach the scenes of commercial activity, there do
railways appear in greater and greater proximity. France strikingly
exemplifies its own theory, that 'Paris is France,' by shewing how all
its important railways spring from the metropolis in six directions.
Belgium exhibits its compact net-work of railways, by which nearly all
its principal towns are accommodated. The phlegmatic Dutchman has as
yet placed the locomotive only in that portion of Holland which lies
between the Rhine and the Zuiderzee. Rhineland, from Bale to
Wiesbaden, is under railway dominion. North Germany, within a circle
of which Magdeburg may be taken as a centre, is railed pretty thickly;
and Vienna has become a point from which lines of great length start.
Exterior to all these are solitary lines, the pioneers of the new
order of things, pointing in directions which will one da