To all general rules, however, there are exceptions; and certainly it would be impossible for our most popular auctioneer, if he wished ever so much to puff off the appearance of Wolverton, to say more of it than that it is a little red-brick town composed of 242 little red-brick houses--all running either this way or that way at right angles--three or four tall red-brick engine-chimneys, a number of very large red-brick workshops, six red houses for officers--one red beer-shop, two red public-houses, and, we are glad to add, a substantial red school-room and a neat stone church, the whole lately built by order of a Railway Board, at a railway station, by a railway contractor, for railway men, railway women, and railway children; in short, the round cast-iron plate over the door of every house, bearing the letters L. N. W. R., is the generic symbol of the town. The population is 1405, of whom 638 are below sixteen years of age; indeed, at Wolverton are to be observed an extraordinary number of young couples, young children, young widows, also a considerable number of men who have lost a finger, hand, arm, or leg. All, however, whether whole or mutilated, look for support to “the Company,” and not only their services and their thoughts but their parts of speech are more or less devoted to it:--for instance, the pronoun “_she_” almost invariably alludes to some locomotive engine; “_he_” to “the chairman;” “_it_” to the London Board. At Wolverton the progress of time itself is marked by the hissing of the various arrival and departure trains. The driver’s wife, with a sleeping infant at her side, lies watchful in her bed until she has blessed the passing whistle of “the down mail.” With equal anxiety her daughter long before daylight listens for the rumbling of “the 3½ A.M. goods up,” on the tender of which lives the ruddy but smutty-faced young fireman to whom she is engaged. The blacksmith as he plies at his anvil, the turner as he works at his lathe, as well as their children at school, listen with pleasure to certain well-known sounds on the rails which tell them of approaching rest.