mode of communication between the horse and his master out of which
grew so many aspects of sublimity under accidents of mists that hid, or
sudden blazes that revealed, of mobs that agitated, or midnight
solitudes that awed. Tidings fitted to convulse all nations must
henceforwards travel by culinary process; and the trumpet that once
announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard
screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to
every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for
ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler. Thus have perished multiform
openings for public expressions of interest, scenical yet natural, in
great national tidings,--for revelations of faces and groups that could
not offer themselves amongst the fluctuating mobs of a railway station.
The gatherings of gazers about a laurelled mail had one centre, and
acknowledged one sole interest. But the crowds attending at a railway
station have as little unity as running water, and own as many centres
as there are separate carriages in the train.

How else, for example, than as a constant watcher for the dawn, and for
the London mail that in summer months entered about daybreak amongst
the lawny thickets of Maryborough forest, couldst thou, sweet Fanny of
the Bath road, have become the glorified inmate of my dreams? Yet
Fanny, as the loveliest young woman for face and person that perhaps in
my whole life I have beheld, merited the station which even now, from a
distance of forty years, she holds in my dreams; yes, though by links
of natural association she brings along with her a troop of dreadful
creatures, fabulous and not fabulous, that are more abominable to the
heart than Fanny and the dawn are delightful.

Miss Fanny of the Bath road, strictly speaking, lived at a mile's
distance from that road, but came so continually to meet the mail that