Cashel Byron's Profession

"They say," said Alice, "that her husband is very jealous, and that

she leads him a terrible life."

"THEY SAY anything that brings gifted people to the level of their

own experience. Doubtless they are right. I have not met Mr.

Herbert, but I have seen his pictures, which suggest that he reads

everything and sees nothing; for they all represent scenes described

in some poem. If one could only find an educated man who had never

read a book, what a delightful companion he would be!"

When the concert was over they did not return directly to town, as

Lydia wished to walk awhile in the gardens. In consequence, when

they left Sydenham, they got into a Waterloo train, and so had to

change at Clapham Junction. It was a fine summer evening, and Alice,

though she thought that it became ladies to hide themselves from the

public in waiting-rooms at railway stations, did not attempt to

dissuade Lydia from walking to and fro at an unfrequented end of the

platform, which terminated in a bank covered with flowers.

"To my mind," said Lydia, "Clapham Junction is one of the prettiest

places about London."

"Indeed!" said Alice, a little maliciously. "I thought that all

artistic people looked on junctions and railway lines as blots on

the landscape."

"Some of them do," said Lydia; "but they are not the artists of our

generation; and those who take up their cry are no better than

parrots. If every holiday recollection of my youth, every escape

from town to country, be associated with the railway, I must feel

towards it otherwise than did my father, upon whose middle age it

came as a monstrous iron innovation. The locomotive is one of the

wonders of modern childhood. Children crowd upon a bridge to see the

train pass beneath. Little boys strut along the streets puffing and

whistling in imitation of the engine. All that romance, silly as it

looks, becomes sacred in afterlife. Besides, when it is not

underground in a foul London tunnel, a train is a beautiful thing.

Its pure, white fleece of steam harmonizes with every variety of

landscape. And its sound! Have you ever stood on a sea-coast skirted

by a railway, and listened as the train came into hearing in the far

distance? At first it can hardly be distinguished from the noise of

the sea; then you recognize it by its vibration; one moment

smothered in a deep cutting, and the next sent echoing from some

hillside. Sometimes it runs smoothly for many minutes, and then

breaks suddenly into a rhythmic clatter, always changing in distance

and intensity. When it comes near, you should get into a tunnel, and

stand there while it passes. I did that once, and it was like the

last page of an overture by Beethoven--thunderingly impetuous. I

cannot conceive how any person can hope to disparage a train by

comparing it with a stage-coach; and I know something of

stage-coaches--or, at least, of diligences. Their effect on the men

employed about them ought to decide the superiority of steam without

further argument. I have never observed an engine-driver who did not

seem an exceptionally intelligent mechanic, while the very writers

and artists who have preserved the memory of the coaching days for

us do not appear to have taken coachmen seriously, or to have

regarded them as responsible and civilized men. Abuse of the railway

from a pastoral point of view is obsolete. There are millions of

grown persons in England to whom the far sound of the train is as

pleasantly suggestive as the piping of a blackbird. Again--is not

that Lord Worthington getting out of the train? Yes, that one, at

the third platform from this. He--"She stopped.