missionaries are sent forth. Walking this evening through Liverpool, and seeing magnificent railroads, docks, custom-houses, and likewise places of worship of all sorts-Independents, Baptists, Ebenezers, and every fancy denomination-I could not help thinking of the poor colliers we had passed in the midst of their millions of brethren, starving like them at the gate of wealth. At almost all the corners are to be found placards regarding benighted Ashantees or other dusky infidels; before the window where this is written is a ferry which has been given up now, but on which the proprietors spent no less than fifty thousand pounds—all of which proves that on the moment the English fancy a thing is to be done the money is found for it. Pray Heaven that we may soon take it into our heads that the country is starving and that the good brave people so suffering deserve every sympathy for the forbearance which they have shown hitherto : that if we do not speedily help them they will help themselves, when stocks and docks and banks and mills and Houses of Parliament may all perish in the riot, and then that for many years we shall never have an opportunity of making another speculation, of building one such more railroad, or saving one more Ashantee from perdition.

...

All this may be said to have little to do with a ride on the box of a coach, nor is it certainly a particularly accurate description of the appearance of the counties of Salop, Denbigh, and Cheshire ; but the country is so wonderfully rich and beautiful that the aspect of misery touches one only the more keenly, and I am ashamed to think that the coach should have overtaken those poor colliers with twelve happy, prosperous people in and outside of it, and yet that the poor fellows should not have had a single shilling from us to get them a day's bread.

To return to the coach: there is a remark which requires the attention of all economists, and that is that the seat upon the box is by far the most expensive position on the outside of the coach. In the first place, in order to secure that eminence you are obliged to pay a fee to the coach-porter; and, secondly, during the ride you come to be so intimately acquainted with the gentleman on your right who holds the whip, and to have such a sincere liking for him in most instances, that it is impossible to fob him off with a mere shilling as a man would do who had his seat behind. The coachman of the Chester and Shrewsbury mail yesterday did a very kind, pretty, and skilful thing. The coach was going along

the road at a gallop (it performs the journey of forty miles with many long stoppages on the road in four hours), when suddenly it pleased a little urchin of three years old who was some way ahead, to cross the road; this act of bravado was effectually performed, and the little wretch had the pleasure of landing safely at the lefthand bank of the road. But example is dangerous, and the child of three having made its run, her sister, a little toddling whiteheaded baby of some twenty months (pater sum, nihil paternum a me alienum puto), must needs follow the elder's course, and began trotting across the road too, its little round arms lifted up, and its little white locks shaking and shining in the sun. The coach was terrifically near and the pace very fast, and if an amateur coachman had had hold of the reins the last day of that poor little tottering baby had come: but, thank Heaven, I have no ambition that way (indeed, beyond twice knocking off the steps of a cab against lamp-posts, I have no exploits of the kind to boast of), and thank Heaven, too, the man driving was a most skilful practitioner of his art-he managed to slacken the pace of his team somewhat, and as the child by the time we came up was in the middle of the road he turned his horses beautifully round it at a few inches from it, and passed on, as the poor little creature did, toddling along quite unconscious and making little jumps towards its elder sister. My first wish, I must confess, was to jump off the coach and bestow a sound and sudden whipping upon the senior urchin, as a caution to it henceforth and for ever: but the worthy coachman was a great deal more gentle, 'Are you the mother of that child?' was all he said to a woman who was standing near, and directly he had his horses going twelve miles an hour again. By Heavens! There is a deal of love and kindness in this world, and it is hard to think that the frank and jolly race of coachmen is destined to disappear.

Twenty-one miles before we reached Chester we had a clear view of its blue towers in the distance; and after passing numberless picturesque villages, old churches, neat mansions, rich fields covered with green corn or sweet-smelling new-mown hay, after going through the town of Wrexham-which in spite of its beautiful church is as dingy and ugly as Ludlow is trim and pretty—we came opposite a grand pseudo-Gothic lodge, under the arch of which we saw an immense blazing gravel road leading straight for two miles. to Eaton Hall, of the parapets and pinnacles of which we caught an outline, for the sun was shining behind the house, of which we had a silhouette in the deepest purple.

Eaton Hall is within a couple of miles of Chester; another lodge leading to it is close by the town, a grand Gothic sort of castellated gate too, which the coachman said (and I believe every word that coachman said) cost twenty thousand pounds. Then we went over a noble bridge across the Dee, having the great red castle to our right, in the yard of which many recruits were performing their exercise, and I saw a whole squad of them in white jackets laboriously placed in the following elegant attitude.

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Fancy, a hundred young heroes standing for five minutes in so natural and ingenious a position.

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