in whose centre you feel as if you were condemned to traverse a strip of arid desert stretching through the landscape; and where any carriage short of a four-in-hand looks so insignificantly small.  Give me country lanes:  so narrow that their glare does not pain the eye upon even the sunniest day:  so narrow that the eye without an effort takes in the green hedges and fields on either side as you drive or walk along.

And now, looking away mentally from this cool shady verdure amid which we are sitting, let us think of summer days elsewhere.  Let us think of them listlessly, that we may the more enjoy the quiet here:  as a child on a frosty winter night, snug in his little bed, puts out a foot for a moment into the chilly expanse of sheet that stretches away from the warm nest in which he lies, and then pulls it swiftly back again, enjoying the cozy warmth the more for this little reminder of the bitter chill.  Here, where the air is cool, pure, and soft, let us think of a hoarding round some old house which the labourers are pulling down, amid clouds of the white, blinding, parching dust of lime, on a sultry summer day.  I can hardly think of any human position as worse, if not intended directly as a position of torture.  I picture, too, a crowded wharf on a river in a great town, with ships lying alongside.  There is a roar of passing drays, a cracking of draymen’s whips, a howling of the draymen.  There is hot sunshine; there are clouds of dust; and I see several poor fellows wheeling heavy casks in barrows up a narrow plank into a ship.  Their faces are red and puffy with the exertion:  their hair is dripping.  Ah, the summer day is hard upon these poor fellows!  But it would be pleasant to-day to drive a locomotive engine through a fine agricultural country, particularly if one were driving an express train, and so were not worried by perpetual stoppages.  I have often thought that I should like to be an engine-driver.  Should any revolution or convulsion destroy the Church, it is to that field of industry that I should devote my energies.  I should stipulate not to drive luggage-trains; and if I had to begin with third-class passenger-trains, I have no doubt that in a few months, by dint of great punctuality and carefulness, and by having my engine always beautifully clean and bright, I should be promoted to the express.  There was a time when driving a locomotive was not so pleasant as now.  In departed days, when the writer was wont to stand upon the foot-plates, through the kindness of engine-driving friends now far away, there was a difficulty in looking out ahead:  the current of air was so tremendous, and particles of dust were driven so viciously into one’s eyes.  But advancing civilization has removed that disadvantage.  A snug shelter is now provided for the driver:  an iron partition arises before him, with two panes of glass through which to look out.  The result is that he can maintain a far more effectual look-out; and that he is in great measure protected from wind