The children’s school seemed under more genial charge, and there were prints hung upon the walls of their school-room. The weaving and spinning-rooms looked cheerful also. Some thirty boys singing hymns together while at work, and seeming contentedly employed. To the old of both sexes, however, this kind of poor-house is utterly repulsive, I was told, and the taking refuge in it is considered by the poor hardly better than starvation. One of the rules seems to bear very hard—married paupers (an old couple for instance,) being put into different wards, and only permitted to see each other once a week, and then in the presence of superintendents.
The flower-beds at the front door were in great splendor with the lillies in bloom. I called the door keeper’s attention to the inappropriateness of this particular ornament to the threshold of a work-house. “They toil not, neither do they spin,” etc., etc., etc.
| [6] | Bloomers please take notice. |
LETTER IV.
An excursion of fifty miles and back “to pass the day” at a place—setting off after breakfast, and getting home “before tea”—used to be done on a witch’s broom exclusively. People who are neither bewitched nor bewitching can do it now! Railroads have disenchanted the world. The secluded Vicarage of S——, is half way from London to Bath, in a village lying upon the route of the Great Western Railroad. I had never seen the Saratoga of England, and, chatting with my kind relatives, over the things that were to be seen in the neighborhood, I was rather startled to hear of the possibility of “passing the day at Bath.” Beau Nash and the Pumproom, rose up, of course, vividly and instantly. The scene of the loves and gayeties of the gayest age of England, was close at my elbow—near enough, at least, to visit without a carpet-bag. The opportunity was not to be lost.
By the “Express” train we might “do” the fifty miles in an hour, but we preferred the slow train to do it in two. We in-car-cerated ourselves, at 10 o’clock of the first fair day I have seen in a month, and were presently getting, (very literally indeed,) a bird’s eye view of the carpet-like scenery of Berkshire.
At the second or third station, we took in, for passengers, four idiots, under the care of an hospital-keeper. When taken out of the carriage in which they were brought, two of them collapsed to the ground, not having mind enough to stand on their legs, though apparently in perfect health. One minute thus and the next minute going at the rate of thirty miles an hour, is a contrast!
At Swindon, the junction between the Gloucester Railway and this, the station buildings are really unnecessarily splendid. The reception room, with its immense mirrors, velvet sofas, bronzes and waiting women in full dress, is as sumptuous as a royal palace. The windows are as large as doors, and of one pane of pier-glass. The room itself is as large and high as the gentlemen’s dining room at the Astor, and yet a room exactly corresponding is on the other side of the track—one to accommodate the “up train,” and the other the “down train.” The rustic inhabitants of the little village of Swindon must live in surprise at the magnificent wants of travellers—the curls and chemisettes of the waiting-girls behind the counter included!
At the little village of “Box,” (a snug name for a village, by the bye) commences the two mile tunnel under the chalk hills, and so suddenly do the cars dive into the darkness, that one’s eyes are at a loss to know what to do with the light left in the eyeballs. If a man ever threatens to “knock the daylight out of me” again, I shall have a glimmer of its having been done before—(at Box.) But I predict an awful smash in this tunnel, yet. Chalk and flint-stones are very friable neighbors, and hills are heavy, and the concussion of air, with a train going under ground at the rate of a mile a minute, is enough to sift away particles very speedily. A train might come out with a load of stone it never went in with, and there is gloomy time enough to anticipate it, while one is whizzing and thundering onwards toward the black dark of the Box tunnel.