nearly as charming in boyish eyes as the buns they handed to you. I acknowledge, further, that but the other day, I saw two schoolboys coming home for the holidays purchase and devour eight stale buns, six flabby sponge cakes, and four pork-pies of venerable and portentous antiquity. And therefore, it is possible that my recollections of the past glories of Wolverton may be tinged with the roseate hues of a youthful imagination. Still, I know that at no period of my life did I ever consider the refreshments provided at Swindon anything but nauseous, and I hope, for the credit of my digestion, I never could have delighted in such a “menu” as that offered to the traveller at most of our English “buffets.” Your choice lies between mutton pasties—in which there is very little meat, and what there is, is gristle,—fly-eaten Bath buns with the sugar rubbed off by long friction, mouldy biscuits, and sandwiches, which stick in your throat, if you try to eat them.
The beverages are even worse. Coffee, with a rich sediment of grits; tea, without any flavour except that of chopped hay; frothy beer, and fiery brandy, are the staple articles of consumption. Even at the few stations where dinners are professedly provided, the passenger is very little better off. Supposing the dinner is tolerable in itself, which it rarely is, it is always arranged after the English fashion, the first element for whose enjoyment is time. Now, the guests of an American hotel in the far West would be ashamed to devour a dinner in the time that our railway passengers are expected to consume theirs in. Any man who can eat several slices of under-done meat, a lump of heavy pudding, and a pound of bread and cheese, in five minutes, without feeling the worse for it afterwards, must be possessed of more than mortal powers of digestion. The consequence of this state of things is, that people eat less and less at our English refreshment rooms. I am told that we travel so quickly, and our distances are so short, that there is no demand for refreshments on the road. It may be so: but the journey from London to Liverpool or Manchester is about as long in time, as that from Boulogne to Paris: yet, the buffet at Amiens does an enormous business; and I always perceive that our fellow-countrymen are the first to avail themselves of its hospitality. But then, at Amiens, you can dine, as well as feed. In fact, people would eat readily fast enough on our English lines, if they had anything given them fit to eat.
The truth is, that in this, as in many other matters on which I might dilate, if I thought the reader would not be tired of my grumblings, our railway companies suffer by want of perception of their real interests. The chief duty, no doubt, of a railroad is to convey its passengers as rapidly as may be to their destination; but then, this is not the whole of its duty. After all, a railway journey is a slice out of one’s existence, and we have a right to ask that it should be made as pleasant as possible. If travelling were more comfortable, there would be more travellers. On our main lines, competition secures decent treatment for a traveller. But on the branch ones, where there is no choice of route, the sole object of our companies seems to be to get as much out of the traveller, and to give him as little, as possible. A wiser and more liberal policy would do much, I think, to swell the scanty receipts of our great purveyors of locomotion.
THE RURAL VERMIN QUESTION.
The perturbation of the public mind this autumn about vermin is as great as reasonable men and experienced farmers and gardeners anticipated. For some years past, and above all in the last year or two, farmers and gardeners, rural parsons and squires and their ladies, have been exerting themselves to avenge their own cause on a detested enemy, and to right the wrongs that they conceive themselves to be sustaining at the hand of Nature. These gentry and farmers do not approve of the system they were born into, by which the various orders of organised beings become food for each other, in so curious a proportion that, if not interfered with, the balance of those orders is preserved, and the earth is allowed to yield her increase with a general regularity which is not likely to be improved by human meddling. Like the country gentry and farmers of France, some of our village potentates have been trying to get rid of a good many of the birds of the air, because birds eat grains and fruits, as well as animal food: and if the experiment should be allowed to go on as long as it has done in France, we shall see the same consequences. We shall see wide tracts of once-fertile land lying waste, and certain crops actually driven out of cultivation by the ravages of the insects which the birds would have kept in check, if they had been allowed to live.
I am glad to see so much stir as there has been this autumn, because it is well that unreasonableness, as well as sense and experience, should be brought to the light. By means of a complete collection of complaints we may learn what is being supposed to be going wrong, and what is demanded as a right and proper state of things. Thus far, the argument seems to be something of this sort:—
There has been a prodigious advance in the cultivation of the soil, in fields and gardens; and there has been a no less striking improvement in rural economy. All field crops are more plentiful than they were in our fathers’ days; and most of them are of a finer quality. Fruits are more rich and various; flowers are rarer and more precious. All are more costly in their production; and it is of far greater consequence than formerly how much of each yield is sacrificed to accidents. When these improvements began to be interesting and important, it was natural for the improvers to quarrel with any intruders on their property, and to wage war with any creatures which seemed to be destroying what was of so much value. Between the speculators in tillage and the preservers of game several orders of “vermin,” winged or quadruped, were hunted almost out of existence: and we see the inevitable consequence in the discontents of this autumn. Where birds have been persecuted, on account of their depredations on fruit and seeds, the plague of grubs,