Safe! On we thundered triumphantly Ealing-wards, with the green lights smiling a benediction on us, telling us that the next ahead was at least a minute ahead, telling the next behind that we, in our turn, were sixty seconds on the right side of safety. "Do you ever get bored with driving the Ealing express?" "No," replied the driver, "I like it! I wanted to do this ever since I became a conductor. Most conductors want to be drivers. The first time you take a train out alone is what you might call a bit of excitement, but it soon wears off." "You don't feel as though you were flying?" "No, you soon lose that feeling." "You never get the wind up?" "No, you can't go wrong if you keep your eyes open and your repair bag in good order!" * * * In a cabin where a signalman kept his eyes on an illuminated map over which little black snakes were crawling--trains coming and trains gone--I met an inspector who had been on London's electric railways for over thirty years! "The changes I've seen?" he said. "Yet it's marvellous what we did in the old days. Do you know that we used to take eighty thousand people a day to exhibitions in the old steam trains? I'm not saying that we weren't a bit packed and a few children on the rack, but--we did it! Now, of course, everything is bigger, quicker, and better, and--you can have the good old days! I remember them and prefer these! "Why, bless my soul, in the good old days we had to have a regular baby hunt nearly every night under the seats of the old trains. Anybody who didn't want a baby seemed to leave it in the Underground." * * * I bought a ticket like any ordinary unenlightened passenger and went back to London in a "smoker" with my thoughts straying to the man in the engine cab ahead, sitting there with his eyes glued to the little _crème de menthe_ lights that tell him he can fly and thunder on through the darkness. Marriage A striped awning leads to the church. A narrow strip of scarlet carpet runs from kerb to porch. Policemen hold back the crowd. Women--always women; and in such numbers, too, and in such remarkable variety. The lily livered misanthrope on a passing omnibus growls: "Another wretched wedding.... What women see in them I cannot imagine." Of course he cannot. Women with their relentless grip on essential realities, see in them the work of the world, the justification of all living--but, naturally, they do not reason it out like that. They go to "see the bride," or, dare I say, to see themselves as the bride, either as they once were or as they hope to be. How remarkably they gather! At one moment the street is normal save for that tell-tale scarlet strip; the next, as a swarm gathers out of the blue sky, so gather the wedding fans, ready, if need be, to prod a policeman in the ribs with an umbrella in order to watch another woman walk through a wedding-ring into a home.... Shall we join the ladies? * * * "Steady on there. Don't push."