Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/75

 the preacher had made impressive allusion to the historic associations of the day; in especial, to the time

"When good Coligny's hoary hair was dabbled all in blood."

1 greatly tickled them, by giving them, in turn, a simple outline, without note or comment, of the sermon I had been hearing. The clergyman from whom it emanated, maugre his use of the surplice in the pulpit, and his zeal for saints' days, was, I was informed, not properly a Puseyite, but rather one of the class of stiff High Churchmen, that germinate into Puseyites when their creed becomes vital within them. For the thorough High Churchman bears, it would appear, the same sort of resemblance to the energetic Puseyite, that a dried bulb in the florist's drawer does to a bulb of the same species in his flower-garden, when swollen with the vegetative juices, and rich in leaf and flower. It is not always the most important matters that take the strongest hold of the mind. The sermon and the ludicrous carvings, linked as closely together, by a trick of the associative faculty, as Cruikshank's designs in Oliver Twist with the letter-press of Dickens, continued to haunt me throughout the evening.

I lodged within a stone-cast of the terminus of the Great Manchester and Birmingham Railway. I could hear the roaring of the trains along the line, from morning till near midday, and during the whole afternoon; and, just as the evening was setting in, I sauntered down to the gate by which a return train was discharging its hundreds of passengers, fresh from the Sabbath amusements of the country, that I might see how they looked. There did not seem much of enjoyment about the wearied and somewhat draggled groups: they wore, on the contrary, rather an unhappy physiognomy, as if they had missed spending the day quite to their minds, and were now