The philosophic traveller leaves his native country in order to study the manners of "our volatile neighbours." At the London Bridge Station he finds a crowd of excited persons, evidently bent on the same object. Every man has a passport in his breast-pocket, and is encumbered with much unnecessary luggage, including the plate-chest, so indispensable to the English gentleman's toilet. A foretaste of foreign sights is given by groups of Frenchmen in beards and moustachios, wrapped in furred garments of strange fashion, and overcome by nervousness at the varied dangers which they are about to encounter. Your correspondent, with proper indifference, reads _Punch_ and the evening papers all the way to Dover. His companions are two anxious Gauls, a boy and his tutor, and a party of exceedingly gay appearance and manners, who has no uniform rule for the introduction or suppression of his h's. He is perhaps a traveller in the button or hook-and-eye line. At Dover the tourist is turned out into the dark with his companions, and finds himself in the power of a band of bravoes, who share the luggage between them, thrust us, the helpless owners, into narrow and filthy dungeons on wheels, and then, reckless of prayers and menaces, hold a council upon our fate. We are at length hurried off into deeper gloom, and the plash of the ocean awakens indefinable apprehensions in the breasts of all. But we wrong the band--they are honest as things go, and will take ransom. A shilling, under pretence of an omnibus ride of a hundred yards, satisfies one ruffian; a second shilling stays the wrath of another, who in return mildly slides your portmanteau down a board into the steamer. This vessel is fuming in great excitement at everybody's confounded stupidity and slowness. "What on earth are you waiting for?" it seems to say. "How can you possibly expect me to take the letters in time? It's all very well for you, you know, but I'm a public character, and have got a reputation to keep up. Don't stand loitering there about those things. Pitch 'em in anyhow. Hang the luggage. What's luggage to letters? You have no idea how important the mail-service is. I know I'm very passionate, and if you don't come at once I shall scream."