aërial flight, let us cast ourselves into yonder Hansom, and bid the driver drive like mad to Euston Square, else we shall miss the seven o’clock train. This Hansom is a most dissipated vehicle, and has evidently been up all night. One of its little silk window-curtains has been torn from its fastenings and flutters in irregular festoons on the inward wall. The cushions are powdered with cigar ashes; there is a theatrical pass-check, and the thumb of a white kid glove, very dirty, lying at the back. The long-legged horse with his ill-groomed coat, all hairs on end like the fretful porcupine his quills, and his tail whisking with derisive defiance in the face of the fare, carries his head on one side, foams at the mouth, and is evidently a dissipated quadruped, guilty, I am afraid, of every vice except hypocrisy. Of the last, certainly, he cannot be accused, for he makes not the slightest secret of his propensity for kicking, biting, gibbing, rearing, and plunging, a succession of which gymnastic operations brings us, in an astonishingly brief space of time, to George Street, Euston Square; where the cabman, who looks like a livery-stable edition of Don Cæsar de Bazan, with a horse-cloth instead of a mantle, tosses the coin given him into the air, catches it again, informs me contemptuously that money will grow warm in my pocket if I keep it there so long, and suddenly espying the remote possibility of a fare in the extreme distance of the Hampstead Road, drives off—“tools” off, as he calls it—as though the Powers of Darkness, with Lucifer and Damagorgon at their head, were after him. I think the Euston Square Terminus is, for its purpose, the handsomest building I have ever seen, and I have seen a few railway stations. There is nothing to compare to it in Paris, where the termini are garish, stuccoed, flimsy-looking structures, half booths and half barracks. Not Brussels, not Berlin, not Vienna, can show so stately a structure, for a railway station, _bien entendu_; and it is only, perhaps, in St. Petersburg, which seems to have been built with a direct reference to the assumption of the Imperial crown at some future period by the King of Brobdignag, that a building can be found—the Moscow Railway Terminus, in fact—to equal in grandeur of appearance our columniated palace of the iron road. But the Russian station, like all else in that “Empire of Façades,” is deceptive: a magnificent delusion, a vast and splendid sham. Of seeming marble without it is; within, but bad bricks and lath and plaster. [Illustration: PARLIAMENTARY TRAIN: PLATFORM OF THE LONDON AND NORTH-WESTERN RAILWAY.]