A RUN ON THE EASTERN COUNTIES RAILWAY.

If we wanted to convey to a foreigner a succinct notion of the way in which the great hive of London is packed, chambered, and worked, we would take him to the Railway terminus at Shoreditch or London Bridge. Here the miracle is accomplished of flying over the roofs and spires, the fantastical tiles, chimney pots, and drunken gables of a dense maze of streets, lanes, squares, crescents, blind alleys, shops, warehouses, and manufactories, enabling the curious explorer of vital statistics to take a bird's-eye view from his aerial car of a mass of human struggle, such as is not to be found elsewhere on the surface of the globe. Asmodeus himself, with all his burglarious tactics, and invisible entries at latticed windows and dormitory trap-doors, never collected domestic episodes half so full of emotion, so dramatic, so varied, or so surprising as are here mapped out in prodigal suggestiveness before the railway traveller. The dilapidated palaces and picturesque cloisters of Cadiz or Seville yield no such historiettes as might be gleaned from these dingy, steaming, crowded neighbourhoods, where the striving and toiling experiences of a single day supply materials for the philanthropic study and practical legislation of years. The imbroglio of Spanish life dege. nerates into a mere intriguing stage comedy in comparison with the real drama of suffering and blight, labour, penury, and vice, which are here exhibited in incessant action from one week's end to another.

We wonder do the Norfolk farmers ever think of these things as they come clattering in over the roofs of myriads of houses? We suppose not. The fat sheep and horned cattle that stand winking their stupid eyes over the bars of their locomotive pens occupy too large a space in the agricultural minds of the farmers to leave any room for speculations on the human droves that are crushed up in the brick-and-mortar pens below. But the strangers who visit London for the first time by the coast-line that swirls over the tragic dens of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, cannot fail to be impressed by the glimpse they get of the living tableau that stretches out on all sides, heaving and yawning under them. They have never seen any thing resembling it, or making the most distant approach to it; even the mysterious purlieus of Nôtre-Dame, the clotted sinks of la Cité, could not furnish them with adequate hints towards the composition of such a picture.

The immensity of London is considerably less bewildering, as an abstract idea, than its populousness. It is easy enough to conceive a large space swept into the girth of a mighty city; and the most pastoral of mankind can form to himself some sort of image of a huge town gradually sprawling out into the country, changing the aspect of the scenery, and absorbing fields, hamlets, and green lanes, in its progress. But it is clearly impossible for his bucolic fancy to conceive in its actual development the existence of vast crowds of human beings piled tier above tier in close, lank houses, compelled for lack of room on the surface to scale the clouds for tenements to drudge and breathe in, heaped up in layers like oysters, and carrying on all the affairs of life, its passions as well as its hard work, love, hate,

jealousy, trade, handicraft, art, thieving, starving, and dying, in a space so stunted as to present a hideous burlesque of the oriental apologue which describes innumerable bevies of angels clustering on the point of a needle. And, for a grave and piteous truth, they are not impalpable angels that we find condensed into these narrow limits, but grown up men and women, and legions of little children, all of whom must be fed and draped somehow to keep up the vitality that staggers in their gaunt frames, and flickers in their ghastly faces. No man can comprehend this spectacle till he has seen it, till he has penetrated to the heart of the squalor, tasted the fetid air, and felt, by personal collision with them, something of the horrors in the midst of which this compressed multitude are huddled up all their lives long.

The flying view which you obtain of one of the most thickly inhabited suburbs of London as you take your departure from the Bishopsgate station of the Eastern Counties Railway, would give you enough to think of for the rest of your journey, if the successive changes of the panorama through which you pass did not drive it out of your head. Some agreeable objects fortunately come to your relief, although of all parts of England the districts that lie between London and Norwich, and between Norwich and Yarmouth, are the flattest, and least interesting. Yet even in all their dreariness and monotony, this eternal dead level of turnips and grass, there are sources of consolation not to be found in more lively and diversified scenery. If the wide pastures of these agricultural counties do not charm you by their sylvan beauties, you have the satisfaction of knowing that they produce the best beef and mutton in the world; and with all respect for the picturesque, we hope we may suggest, without offence, that beef and mutton are not to be despised. We should like to know how poets or painters, whatever they may say, could contrive to get on without them.

A great feeding capacity is the predominant characteristic of the line. There is nothing to interfere with it in the peculiarities of the soil; no interruptions from woods or waterfalls, hill, dell, or gorge; from one end to the other you may put out your imagination to graze with the certainty of a tranquil and extensive enjoyment of the "flowery food." Here and there, as in all country places, there are snatches of rural homesteads, a pretty house with a praukt garden, or a fine mansion starting up amongst a clump of trees, far away on the edge of the horizon; and there are not wanting on the line itself, sundry little incidents which we believe are peculiar to it, and which may be regarded as a series of conundrums obligingly invented by the directors to amuse you as you whisk along. These conundrums are painted in large letters on sign-boards, thus:

SHUT OFF YOUR STEAM!

1 MILE PER HOUR,

GATE. WHISTLE!

Do you give them up? They are instructions to the enginedrivers, and indicate special precautions to be adopted in certain places. You do not understand them, but the engine-drivers do; and the consequence is that, as far as admonitory safeguards can go, there is no line in the kingdom so well secured against accidents. A lively recollection of former fatalities no doubt led to the employ