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336 bags with a hundred pockets. My boxes are very much like other people’s boxes; and I should find it extremely difficult, unless I had my packages before my eyes, to tell of any distinctive mark by which my trunk differs from that of Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones. Now, it not unfrequently happens to me to be turned out late at night, and only half awake, on the platform of one of our great London termini. I never know which end of the train my luggage-van happens to be placed at; and, by the time I have made my way to the right place, I find a confused mass of trunks, bags, and boxes lying on the pavement, surrounded by a crowd of grasping, pushing passengers. Which is my luggage, or where it is, is more than I can say for my life at the moment; and meanwhile, trunk after trunk is being carried off in triumph by some traveller more resolute or unscrupulous than myself. What is to hinder him from seizing on my luggage, or me from appropriating his, I could never discover. If we were found out, we could each of us say we had made a mistake; and I do not see how anybody could contradict the assertion. How much luggage is absolutely lost I cannot tell. Whether the amount is great or small seems to me beyond the question. When a professor of the Berkeley theory, that there is no such thing as matter, was asked why he did not jump out of the window and prove thereby his belief in his own doctrines, he replied, that though—there being no such a thing as a leg or arm—he could not possibly break his bones, yet that he should imagine he had broken them, and the imagination of pain was as painful as any reality could be. Just in the same way I assert that the idea you are going to lose your baggage is just as painful as the fact of having lost it, and therefore, even if our railroads do generally, by some mysterious providence, deliver their luggage to the rightful owners, my objection to the system remains the same.

Whenever I have commented on this subject, and have praised up the foreign system of registering luggage in preference, I am invariably informed that English people would never consent to the delay incident to carrying it out. In a qualified sense, I grant the truth of this objection. If continental travellers carried as much luggage as we do at home, and if they insisted on never reaching the station till two minutes before the train starts, it would be very difficult to weigh the luggage, as they do in France, to enter it in a book, to write its weight, number, destination, and charge for transport, on a debilitated slip of paper, and to hand it to the impatient owner in time for him to catch the train. The arrangement is part and parcel of the system which erects barriers in front of the ticket boxes, recommends you to come half an hour before the time stated in the bills, keeps you locked up in the waiting-rooms, and refuses to allow any one to claim his luggage till all the trunks and bags and boxes are arranged systematically on the long counters—a system with many merits of its own, but one not adapted exactly to British prejudices. But, as far as luggage is concerned, America is the paradise of the railway traveller. No conceivable reason can be assigned why the American plan should not be introduced here. As soon as you arrive at the station, the porter carries your luggage to the freight agent, as the gentleman who looks after the luggage is called in the States. This gentleman has in his hands a number of straps of leather, with a medal at one end and a slit at the other. He asks your destination, passes a strap through the handle of your trunk, fastens it by putting the medal through the slit, hands you another medal the exact counterpart of that attached to your luggage, and then turns to the next traveller. It is all done in a second, and you have nothing to do except to walk on to the cars and take your place, with the medal in your pocket. You may travel from Boston to St. Paul’s, Minnesota, in the Far West, without troubling yourself about your trunks. They will get there as certainly and as quickly as you can yourself. About half an hour before you arrive at your destination a very genteel young man passes through the cars, and asks you what hotel you stop at; you give him your address and your medals, and receive a receipt from him in return. When you get to the station you have no bother about your luggage; you walk or ride, as you like best, to your hotel, and, as soon almost as you are arrived there, you find the luggage standing in the hall. Of course, till we contrive some means by which the guard can communicate with the passengers, we cannot adopt this system in its entirety. But why we do not have the strap-and-medal plan introduced, instead of our cumbrous and unsatisfactory mode of pasting a label on every article of luggage—and why a luggage agent does not establish himself with a van at all our main stations,—are questions I cannot solve. When I can find out why we are not allowed to have street-railroads and steam-ferries, I may possibly be able to form some opinion on the matter. E. D.

Alone, I see the sunrise, from the rocks above the sea;

And the hamlet flushed with rosy light, seems fairy-land to me:

There dwells the pilot’s daughter, whose dear love I’d die to win;

And the blue sky fills my heart with hope, while the merry tide flows in.

Tis noon—we stand together, on the sands beside the sea;

And the maiden, folded to my heart, is sworn my bride to be!

In the sunshine flash the sea-gulls, skimming waves of rippled light;

The fisher boats ride gaily, under cliffs of dazzling white.

Alone, I see the sunset, from the churchyard near the sea,

For the cruel grave-stone at my feet, hides my darling’s face from me!

Like some dark pall, the sea-weeds droop from ledges cold and grey;

The night-mists shroud the hamlet, and the tide ebbs fast away!