t to a
stand-still, the man with his bull's-eye lantern pokes his head into
one doorway after another, and all are kept waiting until all the
tickets are collected. One passenger may have dropped his ticket, and
then comes a search among the hat-boxes and carpet-bags beneath the
seats; another may have underpaid his fare, or overridden the power of
his ticket, and then occurs the fuss of paying up the difference; a
third may be sleeping weariedly in the further corner of the carriage,
and then comes the process of waking him, followed, perhaps, by a
search for the ticket in an incalculable number of pockets. All this
is nicely ill-managed! The larger size of many of the continental
carriages, and the avenue through the centre, enable the ticket-taker
to enter the carriage easily while the train is yet in motion, and to
collect the tickets by the time of arrival at the station. On one of
the Austrian railways, the carriages have an exterior gangway
extending the whole length of the train, by which a guard can obtain
easy access to all the passengers: shortly before arriving at a
station, he enters the carriages, calls out the name of the station
about to be approached, and takes the tickets of those who are to
alight at that station. There is one oddity about the railway
management abroad. In England, a railway smoker commits a high crime
and misdemeanour, for which he is frowned at by his neighbours, and
threatened by the guard; but on the continent, not only do the
passengers smoke abundantly, but we were once rather struck at seeing
a ticket-taker enter the carriage with a meerschaum in his mouth; one
passenger, whose pipe was out, asked the customary German question:
'Haben sie feuer?' and the official gave him a light accordingly. We
believe, however, that there is a wish at head-quarters to keep down
this habit of smoking on the continental railways.

There are two sources of embarrassment which the Englishman is spared
in his own country, but which press upon him in full force while
travelling by rail abroad--namely, the different kinds of distance
measurement, and the different kinds of money employed. Accustomed to
English charges varying from three farthings to threepence per mile,
he is frequently thrown out of his reckoning by the absence of miles
abroad. The French kilometre and the German meile are not English
miles; the former equals 1093 yards, and is therefore a troublesome
fraction of an English mile;