To the second-class: "Tickets, please."
To the third-class: "Now, then, tickets. Look alive here, will you?"
The first-class passenger finds that his wants are better attended to, his questions answered deferentially; he is allowed to take almost any amount of small luggage into the car with him, much of which would be excluded from the second-class, if an attempt were made to carry it in. And O, the potency of the English shilling!
Each car seats eight; but we will suppose that there are a party of four travelling together, and desire no more passengers in the compartments. Call the guard to the window, put your hand in your pocket, looking him in the eye significantly. He will carelessly drop his own hand within the window opening inside the car. You drop a shilling in the hand. "This car is occupied."
"Quite so, sir."
Touching his hat, he locks the car door, and when other people come trying the door, he is conveniently out of the way, or informs the applicant, "Third carriage forward for London, sir," and by a dozen ingenious subterfuges keeps you free from strangers, so much that you betray yourself to him as an American by giving him another shilling at your journey's end; and, although smoking "is strictly forbidden in first-class carriages," a party of three or four smokers, by the judicious use of a couple of shillings, may have one all to themselves for that purpose.
The railway stations in England are very fine, and much superior to those in America, although we are improving ours, especially in the great cities. In the great English cities and towns, the stations are vast iron, glass-roofed structures, kept in excellent order. The waiting-rooms are divided into first, second, and third class, and the door opening upon the platform is not opened until a certain time before the train starts. Porters in uniform take the luggage to the train, and the "guard" who acts as conductor knows nothing about any railway train connections or line beyond his own. The passenger is supposed to know all that sort of thing, and he who "wants to know, you know," is at once recognized as an American.
The country stations are beautiful little rustic affairs, with gardens of roses and sweetbrier, honeysuckles and flowering shrubs about them. Some have the name of the station sown in dwarf flowers upon the bank outside, presenting a very pretty appearance in spring and summer, and contrasting very agreeably with the rude shanties we find in America, with their tobacco-stained floors within, and bare expanse of yellow sand outside.
We rattled through Wales in an express train, a romantic view of wild Welsh mountains on one side, and the beating and heaving ocean dashing up on the other, sometimes almost to the very railway track. We ran through great tunnels, miles in length, whirled at the rate of fifty miles an hour through the great slate-quarrying district and Bangor, past the magnificent suspension bridge over Menai Straits, by the romantic old castle of Conway, with its shattered battlements and turrets looking down at the sea, which dashes up its foam-crested waves ceaselessly at its rocky base, the old red sandstone walls worn and corroded with time; on, past thatched huts, rustic cottages, and green landscape, till the panting train halted at the great modern railway station in that oldest of English cities, Chester.
This station is one of the longest in England, being ten hundred and fifty feet long, and having wings, a kind of projecting arcades, with iron roofs, to shelter vehicles waiting for trains. From this magnificent modern-built station a cab carried us, in a few minutes, on our route to the hotel (Grosvenor House), into an old street that looked as though we had got into a set scene at the theatre, representing a street in Windsor for Falstaff and the Merry Wives to appear in; houses built in 1500, or years before, the street or sidewalks passing right under some of them; quaint old oddities of architecture, with curious inscriptions in abbreviated old English on their carved cross-beams, and their gables sticking out in every direction; curious little windows with diamond-shaped panes set in lead; and houses looking as though the hand of time had squeezed them together, or extracted the juice from them like sucked oranges, and left only the dried rind, half shrunken from its original shape, remaining.