little glimpses that have a
character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow might see
them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land on some
Olympian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few children huzzah and wave
their hands to the express; but for the most part, it is an interruption
too brief and isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease
from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal
boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a
leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and
yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been
precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not a
tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to indicate that she has been
even conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief
attraction of railway travel. The speed is so easy, and the train
disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart
becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while
the body is borne forward in the flying chain of carriages, the thoughts
alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; they make
haste up the poplar alley that leads towards the town; they are left
behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches
the long train sweep away into the golden distance.

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and
delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable
line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment;
for sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the
occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and
sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern
sunshine peeping through the _persiennes_, and the southern patois
confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early or late,
however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many
others of the same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found
him, and give a new significance to all he may see for many days to
come. There is something in the mere name of the South that carries
enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks up his
ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the
permanent lines and character of the landscape, as if he had been told
that it wa