On the 27th of January, at eight in the morning, a huge pyramid of luggage blocked up the London station of the South-eastern Railway. Troops of boys hovered about, some true Cockney lads, and others half-Frenchified, with an occasional usher fussing about the boxes. “Do you see that mountain, sir?” said the superintendent to us. “All school traps, sir.” “Two hundred boys at least?” we interposed, interrogatively. “No; only fifty. Fill a steamer, sir, itself.” However, the master contrived to get all put right, the mountain vanished into the waggons, the whistle blew, and we were off. The boys gave a hearty hurra as we left the station, which they repeated, time after time, at every fresh start we made, from station to station. At Dover the boat was waiting, the day fine, the wind in our favour, the sea moderately smooth, and by 11.40 we were on our way to Calais. Alas for the brave boys! The last cheer was given as they bade adieu to the cliffs of Dover. Melancholy came over them by degrees. It was painful to see how home-sick they became. From the bottom of their stomachs they regretted leaving their native land, and, heart-sore, chopfallen, and sorely begrimed as to their smart caps and jackets, they paraded, two hours after, before the customhouse at Calais, like the broken relics of a defeated army. M. Henequin was importing the half-yearly draft of Cockney boys to his school at Guines; and we recommend such of our readers as are curious in sea-comforts respectfully to decline the companionship of M. Henequin and his troop, should they at any future time lucklessly stumble upon them on the gangway of a steamer. At Calais the patriotic and Protestant Englishman, who visits the cathedral of Nôtre Dame, will particularly admire a huge modern painting, which is supposed to adorn the north transept, and will have no difficulty in interpreting the meaning looks of the gaping peasantry when he reads underneath—“Calais taken from the English in 1558, and _restored to Catholicity_.” The Pas de Calais—at least that portion of the department of that name through which the railway runs—at once tells the Englishman that he is in a new country. Low, wet, and marshy, like the seaward part of Holland, it is parcelled out, drained, and fenced by numberless ditches. Wandering over its tame and, in winter at least, most uninviting surface, the eye finds only occasional rows of small pollard willows to rest upon, as if the scavengers of the land had all gone home to dinner, and in the mean time had planted their brooms in readiness along the sides of the ditches they were employed to scour.