change the war has unquestionably made:  more women smoke in the restaurants than formerly.  Sanguine people declare that other changes are impending; but other people, equally sanguine, are doing their best to prevent this.  The human race is gradually feeling its way back to its traditional division into those who desire a change and those who desire to keep things as they are.  The Christmas festival appeals to both equally.  It is at once an old custom and the prophecy of a new earth.  On such a day one can rejoice even without currants or the League of Nations.  The world is a good place.  Let us eat, drink, and be merry.

XIV

IN THE TRAIN

It is said that travelling by train is to be made still more uncomfortable.  I doubt if there is a man of sufficient genius in the Government to accomplish this.  Are not the trains already merely elongated buses without the racing instincts of the bus?  Have they not already learned to crawl past mile after mile of backyard and back garden at such a snail’s pace that we have come to know like an old friend every disreputable garment hung out on the clothes-lines of a score of suburbs?  Do they not stand still at the most unreasonable places with the obstinacy of an ass?  Stations, the names of which used to be an indistinguishable blur as we swept past them as on a swallow’s wing, have now become a part of the known world, and have as much attention paid to them as though they were Paris or Vienna.  Equality has not yet been established among men, but it has been established among stations.  There never was such a democracy of frightfulness.

We seldom see a station which has about it the air of permanence.  There are, I believe good historical reasons why there are no Tudor stations or Queen Anne stations to be found in the country.  Still, I know of no reason why so many stations should look as though they had been built hurriedly to serve the needs of a month, like a travelling show in a piece of waste ground.  Not that the railway station has any of the gaudy detail of the travelling show.  It resembles it only in its dusty and haphazard setting.  It is more like a builder’s or a tombstone-maker’s yard.  The very letters in which the name of the station is printed are often of a deliberate ugliness.  No newspaper would tolerate letters of such an ugliness in its headlines.  They stare at one vacuously, joylessly.  It is said that the village of Amberley is known to the natives as “Amberley, God help us!” How many stations look at us from their name-plates with that “God help us!” air!  What I should like to see would be a name-plate that would seem to announce to us in passing:  “Glasgow, thank God!” or whatever the name of the station may be.  I have never yet discovered a merry station.  Here and there a station-master has done his best to make the place attractive by planting geraniums in the form of letters to spell the name of the place