Another small difference occurs to me as illustrative of the changes that time and _the rail_ have brought about. I heard very little of the once familiar Devonshire dialect. Something of intonation there may yet linger, but of the old idioms and phraseology little or nothing. But I have been beguiled into all these reminiscences of the fair capital of the west and my early days there, by the quicksilver mail, itself a most compendious and almost complete illustration of the nature of the differences between its own day and that of its successor, the rail! To the rail is due principally much of the changed appearance of London. Certainly the domestic architecture of the Georgian period has little enough of beauty to recommend it. It is insignificant, mean and prosaic to an extraordinary degree, as we all know. But it is not marked by the audacious, ostentatious, nightmare-hideousness of the railway arches and viaducts and stations of modern London. It is difficult to say whether the greatest change in the daily life and habits of a Londoner has been produced by gas, by Peel’s police, electric telegraphy, modern postal arrangements, or the underground railway. Can the present generation picture to itself what London was and looked like when lighted only by the few twinkling oil lamps which seemed to serve no other purpose save to make darkness visible? Can it conceive a London policeless by day, and protected at night only by a few heavily great-coated watchmen, very generally asleep in their “boxes,” and equipped with a huge rattle in one hand and a large stable lanthorn in the other? The twopenny post was considered an immense boon to Londoners and their needs of quick communication between the different districts of their even then overgrown town. But what would they have thought of an almost hourly postal delivery, and of the insufficient quickness of that being supplemented by telegraphic messages, to be outstripped in their turn by telephony? And what would the modern Londoner think of doing without all these things? But perhaps the underground railways have most of all revolutionised the London habits of the present day. Why, even to me, who knew cabless London, they seem to have become indispensable. I loathe them! The hurry-scurry! The necessity of “looking sharp!” The difficulty of ascertaining which carriage you are to take, and of knowing when you have arrived at your journey’s end! The horrible atmosphere! All strong against the deed! And yet the necessities of time and place in the huge overgrown monster of a town seem to compel me to pass a large portion of my hours among the sewers, when I find myself a dazed and puzzled stranger in the town I once knew so well.