Perhaps the most peculiar and striking of all the Continental travelling arrangements is the system of waiting–rooms. It introduces to English people a difference of method of a somewhat irritating description. The _salle–d’attente_ is a species of sheep pen into which the traveller is driven after he has obtained his railway billets and had his luggage registered, and where he must remain helplessly shut up till the train by which he is to travel is about to leave. Generally a separate large room is provided for each of the three classes of travellers, and the rule is that nobody is allowed to enter without exhibition of the railway ticket appropriate to that particular class; and as this cannot be done till the luggage be registered and paid for, which seldom takes less than a quarter of an hour, if ladies be of the party, they must wait with all the patience possible, guarding the little articles to be taken into the railway carriage, in the large hall of the office, where ofttimes there is not a seat or a comfortable or clean one to be had. Once or twice, in breach of the regulations, I have got them passed into the waiting–room. In the _salle–d’attente_ itself, penetrated under burden of all these little _impedimenta_ (for it is rare good luck to get a porter to help), a crowd of people all similarly laden is found, and there the passengers have to wait sometimes for long periods till within four or five minutes of the starting of the train, when a man opens the door of the prison–house or menagerie and shouts out, ‘_Messieurs les voyageurs, pour_ (naming the places) _en voiture!_’ It may happen that there are several such shouts for other trains before your own is announced, and your sudden preparations for departure are stopped by the discovery that your turn has not yet come, and you are not allowed to leave the place of confinement. When your turn does come, you gather up your things, which no porter helps you to carry, and rush pell–mell out with the crowd. There is no servant to tell you where to go, and your only security not to do wrong is to follow the multitude. When you reach the carriages, it is seldom they have any board or placard indicating their destination. If there should by any chance be an official about, he is not there for the purpose of directing people; and if you ask him, he gives about as slender information in answer as possible. It is folly, however, to stop to ask him in the first instance. The plan is, trudging on with wraps and bags and all the little things, to bundle into the first open carriage where there appears to be sufficient room, and secure seats as best you can, and then get out and make inquiries for certainty’s sake. If you do not do so, and a lady, to recover breath, halts an instant with foot on step before ascending, others will coolly mount before her and take possession, and there may be the utmost possible difficulty in procuring seat–room elsewhere, foreigners