nary process; and the trumpet that once
announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking, when heard screaming
on the wind, and advancing through the darkness to every village
or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the
pot-wallopings of the boiler.

Thus have perished multiform openings for sublime effects, for interesting
personal communications, for revelations of impressive faces that could not
have offered themselves amongst the hurried and fluctuating groups of
a railway station. The gatherings of gazers about a mail-coach had one
centre, and acknowledged only one interest. But the crowds attending at
a railway station have as little unity as running water, and own as many
centres as there are separate carriages in the train.

How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for
the London mail that in summer months entered about dawn into the lawny
thickets of Marlborough Forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of the Bath road,
have become known to myself? Yet Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for
face and person that perhaps in my whole life I have beheld, merited
the station which even _her_ I could not willingly have spared; yet
(thirty-five years later) she holds in my dreams: and though, by an
accident of fanciful caprice, she brought along with her into those dreams
a troop of dreadful creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that were more
abominable to a human heart than Fanny and the dawn were delightful.

Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's distance
from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail, that I on my
frequent transits rarely missed her, and naturally connected her name
with the great thoroughfare where I saw her; I do not exactly know, but I
believe with some burthen of commissions to be executed in Bath, her own
residence being probably the centre to which these commissions gathered.
The mail coachman, who wore the royal livery, being one amongst the
privileged few,[6] happened to be Fanny's grandfather. A good man he
was, that loved his beautiful granddaughter; and, loving her wisely, was
vigilant over her deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen
to be concerned. Was I then vain enough to imagine that I myself,
individually, could fall within the line of his terrors? Certainly not,
as regarded any physical pretensions that I could plead; for Fanny (as a
chance passenger from her own neighborhood onc