whizzing by, or of losing their heads in one of the windows of the down train: they ride for miles in utter damp and darkness; through awful pipes of brick, that have been run pitilessly through the bowels of gentle mother earth, the cast-iron Frankenstein of an engine gallops on, puffing and screaming. Does any man pretend to say that he _enjoys_ the journey?--he might as well say that he enjoyed having his hair cut; he bears it, but that is all: he will not allow the world to laugh at him, for any exhibition of slavish fear; and pretends, therefore, to be at his ease; but he is afraid, nay, ought to be, under the circumstances. I am sure Hannibal or Napoleon would, were they locked suddenly into a car; there kept close prisoners for a certain number of hours, and whirled along at this dizzy pace. You can’t stop, if you would;--you may die, but you can’t stop; the engine may explode upon the road, and up you go along with it; or, may be a bolter, and take a fancy to go down a hill, or into a river: all this you must bear, for the privilege of travelling twenty miles an hour. This little journey, then, from Paris to Versailles, that used to be so merry of old, has lost its pleasures since the disappearance of the cuckoos; and I would as lieve have for companions the statues that lately took a coach from the bridge opposite the Chamber of Deputies, and stepped out in the Court of Versailles, as the most part of the people who now travel on the railroad. The stone figures are not a whit more cold and silent than these persons, who used to be, in the old cuckoos, so talkative and merry. The prattling grisette and her swain from the Ecole de Droit; the huge Alsacian carabinier, grim smiling under his sandy moustaches and glittering brazen helmet; the jolly nurse, in red calico, who had been to Paris to show mamma her darling Lolo, or Guguste;--what merry companions used one to find squeezed into the crazy old vehicles that formerly performed the journey! But the age of horseflesh is gone--that of engineers, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the pleasure of coucoudom is extinguished for ever. Why not mourn over it, as Mr. Burke did over his cheap defence of nations, and unbought grace of life; that age of chivalry, which he lamented, _à propos_ of a trip to Versailles, some half a century back? Without stopping to discuss (as might be done, in rather a neat and successful manner) whether the age of chivalry was cheap or dear, and whether, in the time of the unbought grace of life, there was not more bribery, robbery, villainy, tyranny, and corruption, than exists even in our own happy days,--let us make a few moral and historical remarks upon the town of Versailles, where, between railroad and _coucou_, we are surely arrived by this time.