bad, though of course it is sometimes better and sometimes worse.
It is hard to know if it is more hotel or more station; perhaps
it is a mixture of each which defies analysis; but in its well-
studied composition you pass, as it were, from your car to your
room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting the fact
poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at
the most; and when you have entered your room your train has
ceased to be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America,
where our trains, when not shrieking at the tops of their
whistles, are backing and filling with a wild clangor of their
bells, and making a bedlam of their stations; but in England they

"Come like shadows, so depart,"

and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.


I

These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest
wonder of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some
ways more wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much
planned on our native methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a
merit, of antedating our Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-
historically it is indefinitely older. My sole recorded
impression of it is that I found it smelling strongly of coal-
gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing
centre; and it would be paltering with the truth not to own a