Besides the above there is a flying library of about 600 volumes for the clerks, porters, police, as also for their wives and families, residing at the various stations, consisting of books of all kinds, excepting on politics and on religious controversies. They are despatched to the various stations, carriage free, in nineteen boxes given by the Company, each of which can contain from twenty to fifty volumes.
For the education of the children of the Company’s servants, a school-house, which we had much pleasure in visiting, has been constructed on an healthy eminence, surrounded by a small court and garden. In the centre there is a room for girls, who, from nine till five, are instructed by a governess in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, and needlework. Engaged at these occupations we counted fifty-five clean, healthy faces. In the east wing we found about ninety fine, stout, athletic boys, of various ages, employed in the studies above mentioned (excepting the last), and learning, moreover, mathematics and drawing. One boy we saw solving a quadratic equation—another was engaged with Euclid—others with studying land-surveying, levelling, trigonometry, and one had reached conic sections.
At the western extremity of the building, on entering the infant-school, which is under the superintendence of an intelligent looking young person of about nineteen years of age, we were struck by the regular segments in which the little creatures were standing in groups around a tiny monitor occupying the centre of each chord. We soon, however, detected that this regularity of their attitudes was caused by the insertion in the floor of various chords of hoop iron, the outer rims of which they all touched with their toes. A finer set of little children we have seldom beheld; but what particularly attracted our attention was three rows of beautiful babies sitting as solemn as judges on three steps one above another, the lowest being a step higher than the floor of the room. They were learning the first hard lesson of this world—namely, to sit still; and certainly the occupation seemed to be particularly well adapted to their outlines; indeed their pinafores were so round, and their cheeks so red, that altogether they resembled three rows of white dumplings, with a rosy-faced apple on each. The picture was most interesting; and we studied their cheerful features until we almost fancied that we could analyze and distinguish which were little fire-flies—which small stokers—tiny pokers—infant artificers, &c.
On leaving the three rooms full of children, to whom, whatever may be the religion of their parents, the Perpetual Curate, the Rev. G. Weight, is apparently devoting very praiseworthy attention, we proceeded eastward about 100 yards to the church, the property of the Radcliffe Trustees, the interior of which is appropriately fitted up with plain oak-coloured open seats, all alike. In the churchyard, which is of very considerable area, there are, under the north wall, a row of fraternal mounds side by side, with a solitary shrub or a few flowers at the foot of each, showing that those who had there reached their earthly terminus were kindly recollected by a few still travelling on the rails of life. With the exception, however, of the grave of one poor fellow, whose death under amputation, rendered necessary from severe fractures, has been commemorated on a tombstone by his comrades, there exists no interesting epitaph. Besides this church, a room in the library is used, when required, as a Wesleyan Chapel; at which on Sundays there are regular preachers both morning and night—and on Tuesdays and Fridays about 100 of the Company’s servants attend extempore prayers by one of their brother artificers.
CHAPTER X.
Letters and Newspapers.
Among the manifold arrangements which characterise the interior of the British hive there is, we believe, no one which offers to an intelligent observer a more important moral than the respect which is everywhere paid by us to the correspondence of the nation. Prior to the introduction of railways our post-office establishment was the admiration of every foreigner who visited us. But although our light mail-coaches, high-bred horses, glittering harness, skilful coachmen, resolute guards, and macadamised roads were undeniably of the very best description, yet the moral basis on which the whole fabric rested, or rather the power which gave vitality to its movements, evidently was a patriotic desire indigenous in the minds of people of all classes to protect, as their common wealth, the correspondence of the country; and accordingly it mattered not whether on our public thoroughfares were to be seen a butcher’s cart, a brewer’s dray, a bishop’s coach, a nobleman’s landau, the squire’s chariot or his tenant’s waggon;—it mattered not what quantity of vehicles were assembled for purposes good, bad, or indifferent, for church, for race-course, or for theatre;—it mattered not for what party of pleasure or for what political purpose a crowd or a mob might have assembled; for at a single blast through a long tin horn people of all ranks and conditions, however they might be disposed to dispute on all other subjects, were ready from all quarters to join together in exclaiming, “Make way for the mail!”
At the magic whistle of the locomotive engine the whole of the extremely slow, dull, little-bag system we have just referred to suddenly fell to pieces. Nevertheless, the spirit that had animated it flew from the road to the rails, and although our penny-postal arrangements, notwithstanding their rapid growth, are less conspicuous, there exists throughout the country the same honest anxiety that our letter-bags should be circulated over the surface of the United Kingdom with the utmost possible care and despatch. In order, however, to fulfil this general desire the duties which our Postmaster-General is now required to perform are most extraordinary.
The difficulty of transmitting from London to every part of the United Kingdom, and vice versâ, the innumerable quantity of letters which, like mushrooms springing up from a bed of spawn, have arisen from our sudden adoption of a penny-postage, would alone require minute calculations, involving an infinity of details; but when it is considered that besides this circulation from and to the heart of the metropolis—(the average weight of letters and newspapers carried daily by the London and North-Western Railway is seventeen tons)—there exists simultaneously a cross circulation, not only from and to every great city and town, but from every little post-office to every part of the United Kingdom and vice versâ, and moreover to every region on the globe, the eccentric zigzag courses of all these letters to their respective destinations may justly be compared to the fiery tracks and sparks created by the sudden ignition of a sackful of fireworks of all descriptions; of rockets, Catherine wheels, Roman candles, squibs, stars, crackers, flower-pots, some flying straight away, while others are revolving, twisting, radiating, bouncing, exploding in every possible direction and in all ways at once.
To explain the mode in which all our postal arrangements are conducted would not only exceed our limits, but be foreign to our subject; we will therefore only attempt to supply our readers with a slight sketch of a very small portion of this business, namely, the transmission of letters from the metropolis by the London and North-Western Railway’s night mail.