interest, ascend with the rest. The train is light to-night, and I share
my compartment with but two fellow-travellers; one, a compatriot in an
obsolete cravat, who thinks it a quite unaccountable thing that they
don't keep "London time" on a French railway, and who is made angry by
my modestly suggesting the possibility of Paris time being more in their
way; the other, a young priest, with a very small bird in a very small
cage, who feeds the small bird with a quill, and then puts him up in the
network above his head, where he advances twittering to his front wires,
and seems to address me in an electioneering manner. The compatriot (who
crossed in the boat, and whom I judge to be some person of distinction,
as he was shut up, like a stately species of rabbit, in a private hutch
on deck) and the young priest (who joined us at Calais) are soon asleep,
and then the bird and I have it all to ourselves....

LETTERS
[Sidenote: _Walter Bagehot_]

The complete letter-writer is now an unknown animal. In the last
century, when communications were difficult, and epistles rare, there
were a great many valuable people who devoted a good deal of time to
writing elaborate letters. You wrote letters to a man whom you knew
nineteen years and a half ago, and told him what you had for dinner, and
what your second cousin said, and how the crops got on. Every detail of
life was described and dwelt on, and improved. The art of writing, at
least of writing easily, was comparatively rare, which kept the number
of such compositions within narrow limits. Sir Walter Scott says he knew
a man who remembered that the London post-bag once came to Edinburgh
with only one letter in it. One can fancy the solemn, conscientious
elaborateness with which a person would write, with the notion that his
letter would have a whole coach and a whole bag to itself, and travel
two hundred miles alone, the exclusive object of a red guard's care. The
only thing like it now--the deferential minuteness with which one public
office writes to another, conscious that the letter will travel on her
Majesty's service three doors down the passage--sinks by comparison into
cursory brevity.

No administrative reform will be able to bring even the official mind of
these days into the grave inch-an-hour conscientiousness with which a
confidential correspondent of a century ago related the growth of
apples, the manufacture of jams, the appearance of flirtations, and
other