London to buy stone bottles, and carried them back rattling in a box; a handsome dragoon, with a very pretty girl,—­her eyes full of tears,—­on his arm, to see him off; another female was waiting at the door for the same purpose, when the dragoon bolted, and took refuge in the interior of the station.  In a word, a parliamentary train collects,—­besides mechanics in search of work, sailors going to join a ship, and soldiers on furlough,—­all whose necessities or tastes lead them to travel economically, among which last class are to be found a good many Quakers.  It is pleasing to observe the attention the poor women, with large families and piles of packages, receive from the officers of the company, a great contrast to the neglect which meets the poorly clad in stage-coach travelling, as may still be seen in those districts where the rail has not yet made way.

We cannot say that we exactly admire the taste of the three baronets whom a railway superintendent found in one third-class carriage, but we must own that to those to whom economy is really an object, there is much worse travelling than by the Parliamentary.  Having on one occasion gone down by first-class, with an Oxford man who had just taken his M.A., an ensign of infantry in his first uniform, a clerk in Somerset House, and a Manchester man who had been visiting a Whig Lord,—­and returned third-class, with a tinker, a sailor just returned from Africa, a bird-catcher with his load, and a gentleman in velveteens, rather greasy, who seemed, probably on a private mission, to have visited the misdemeanour wards of all the prisons in England and Scotland; we preferred the return trip, that is to say, vulgar and amusing to dull and genteel.  Among other pieces of information gleaned on this occasion, we learned that “for a cove as didn’t mine a jolly lot of readin and writin, Readin was prime in winter; plenty of good vittles, and the cells warmed.”

It must be remarked that the character of the Parliamentary varies very much according to the station from which it starts.  The London trains being the worst, having a large proportion of what are vulgarly called “swells out of luck.”  In a rural district the gathering of smock-frocks and rosy-faced lasses, the rumbling of carts, and the size, number, and shape of the trunks and parcels, afford a very agreeable and comical scene on a frosty, moonlight, winter’s morning, about Christmas time, when visiting commences, or at Whitsuntide.  No man who has a taste for studying the phases of life and character should fail to travel at least once by the Parliamentary.

The large cheap load having rumbled off from the south side of the station, about nine o’clock preparations are commenced for the aristocratic Express, which, on this line, is composed of first-class carriages alone, in which, at half the price of the old mail coach fares, the principal stations on the line are reached at railway speed.