u are above thickly-thronged streets, and
the houses on either side, looking down into the black throats of
smoky chimneys; into the garret lairs of poverty, sickness, and sin;
down lower upon squads of children trying to play in back-yards
eight feet square. It is all wrong, except in the single quality of
speed. You enter the town as you would a farmer's house, if you
first passed through the pig-stye into the kitchen. Every
respectable house in the city turns its back upon you; and often a
very brick and dirty back too, though it may show an elegant front
of Bath or Portland stone to the street it faces. All the
respectable streets run over or under you with an audible shudder of
disgust or dread. None but a shabby lane of low shops for the sale
of junk, beer, onions, shrimps, and cabbages, will run a third of a
mile by your side for the sake of your company. The wickedest boys
in the town hoot at you, with most ignominious and satiric antics,
as you pass; and if they do not shie stones in upon you, 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