Stokers and pokers : $b or, The London and North-Western Railway, the electric telegraph, and the railway clearing-houseHead, Francis Bond, Sir
History
Stokers and pokers : $b or, The London and North-Western Railway, the electric telegraph, and the railway clearing-house
Head, Francis Bond, Sir
London and North-Western Railway; Railway Clearing House (London, England); Telegraph -- Great Britain
WOLVERTON.
Flying by rail through green fields below Harrow Hill and thence
to Watford,--stopping for a moment in a deep cutting to hear a man
cry “_Tring!_” and a bell say “_Ring!_” until the passenger gets so
confused with the paltry squabble that he scarcely knows which of
the two competitors is vociferating the substantive and which the
verb,--we will now conduct our readers to the Station and little town
of Wolverton.
As every city, village, or hamlet on the surface of the globe is
usually inhabited by people of peculiar opinions, professions,
character, tastes, fashions, follies, whims, and oddities, so there
is always to be witnessed a corresponding variety in the allinement
and architecture of their dwellings--the forms and excrescences of
each often giving to the passing traveller a sort of phrenological
insight into the character of the inmates. One street, inhabited
by poor people, is as crooked as if it had been traced out by the
drunken Irishman who, on being kindly questioned, in a very narrow
lane across which he was reeling, as to the length of road he had
travelled, replied, “_Faith! it’s not so much the length of it as
the_ BREADTH _of it that has tired me_!” Another--a rich street--is
quite straight. Here is a palace--there are hovels. The hotel is of
one shape--the stock-exchange of another. There are private houses
of every form--shops of every colour--columns, steeples, fountains,
obelisks _ad infinitum_. Conspicuous over one door there is to
be seen a golden pestle and mortar--from another boldly projects
a barber’s pole--a hatchment decorates a third--the Royal Arms a
fourth--in short, it would be endless to enumerate the circumstantial
evidence which in every direction proves the truth of the old saving,
“_Many men, many minds_.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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