Sunday cheap trips to Hastings were early and for long a feature, and eventually roused the wrath of the Working Men’s Lord’s Day Rest Association. We need not here go into the rights and wrongs of Sunday tripping; but should any one discover a little book called “The Story of our Sunday Trip to Hastings,” published on behalf of that excellent body, let him read it, and find therein a fund of unconscious humour. The whole and sole intent and purpose of the book is to show, not merely how sinful it is to take a cheap Sunday trip by railway—and especially, it would appear, to Hastings—but how inevitably uncomfortable and even disastrous it will be. It is a tale of how, one August, a decent working man and his wife and little girl, and an assortment of friends, tripped one Sunday to this seaside. They started betimes—arising at four o’clock in the morning—probably with some foreboding sense that if you want to journey anywhere by South Eastern Railway it is well to get up in advance of the early bird, if not even to start the day before. They drove to Charing Cross in a cab, and it was already very warm. The cabman, indeed, “used a strong expression” to enforce his opinion that they would find it very hot. I think we all know the poetical phrase that cabman made use of. Of course, the object being to paint this trip in very strong colours, mischances early began; but the party need not have been quite such fools as they are described. Passing over the inevitable dispute with the cabman, we follow them on to the platform, where they saw a porter slip and nearly get killed, whereupon “a sickening horror came over them at the thought of the scene they might have witnessed.” As for that, if you are to speculate upon the grisly “might be,” the blood-boltered “if,” the catastrophic “may happen,” why then there is no peace of mind for you at all, week-day or Sunday. Friends who were to have been met on the platform were all but missed, and when found insisted upon quarrelling with strangers and quizzing other members of the party, until at length the train “ceased to move, and we were at our journey’s end.” It did not just “stop,” as ordinarily it does. See now our party at Hastings. The day was blazing hot, and no shelter was to be found. The glare off the sea seared their eyes, and they took refuge in the streets, with the bitter reflection that they need not have left their home in happy Islington to see pavements and closed shops. Dinner was suggested, and they resorted to a dining-room, rich in the mingled odours of sage and onions and tobacco-smoke, where they dined off what purported to be gosling, but was really an old and half-starved fowl. If the dishes were lukewarm, the room, on the other hand, was blazing hot. “Mr. Peters,” one of the party, called for “malt liquor”—could it by any chance have been “beer”?—and saw that somebody else paid for it; and, this princely and elegant meal over, the party dispersed in various directions.