Over the Ocean Part 2

On some of the English railroads that I travelled over, it seemed as though the only duty the company thought they had to perform, was to simply carry you over their road; and the ignorance of some of the under employes was positively amazing. Seated in the carriage, you might ride twenty miles past the station at which you wished to stop without knowing it, if you chanced to be on the off side.

There was no conductor to pa.s.s and repa.s.s _through_ the train, to look out that you debarked at the proper station; no list of towns on the back of your railroad check; no shout of "Pa.s.sengers for Chester!

Chester!" when the train stopped; and the guard knew nothing of any other train except his own, or any other distance over the road, or of how to connect with any other train.

The pa.s.senger is left to himself, and is never told by the guard to "change cars here for ----." That, you have to know yourself, and look out and have the railway porter get your luggage (not _baggage_) off, or it will carried on, as they have no check system--another American affair, which it won't do to adopt too readily.

Luggage is weighed, and, beyond a certain amount, charged for; but any portmanteau one can get under the seat is free; and it is astonishing what big valises some men carry. And in the absence of the check system, this is, of course, the safest way.

Comparatively little luggage is lost or stolen. One reason why it is not stolen is, that there is a law here which _punishes_ thieves, and does not allow them liberty for a stipulated sum, known as _bail_ in America.

The price in the first-cla.s.s carriage, on the fast or express trains, is about a third higher than the second. A third cla.s.s is still cheaper.

The parliamentary or slow trains have cheaper rates than the express.

The division of "cla.s.ses" is, in many respects, an excellent arrangement. It affords to him who desires better accommodations, and has the means to pay for them, the opportunity of enjoying them; and it does not force the poor man, the laborer or emigrant, to ride in a richly upholstered carriage, where he feels he is out of place, when he would prefer to save his money, and have less gilding and upholstery.

One very soon finds, in England, the deference paid to cla.s.s and to wealth, and nowhere sooner than on the railway train. It is presumed, on the expensive routes, that those riding in first-cla.s.s carriages are "first-cla.s.s" people, and the guard's manner to the pa.s.sengers in the different carriages is an index of English education in this matter. As he appears at the window of the first-cla.s.s carriage, he politely touches his hat:--

"All are for London in this compartment? Thank you."

To the second-cla.s.s: "Tickets, please."

To the third-cla.s.s: "Now, then, tickets. Look alive here, will you?"

The first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger finds that his wants are better attended to, his questions answered deferentially; he is allowed to take almost any amount of small luggage into the car with him, much of which would be excluded from the second-cla.s.s, if an attempt were made to carry it in.

And O, the potency of the English shilling!

Each car seats eight; but we will suppose that there are a party of four travelling together, and desire no more pa.s.sengers in the compartments.

Call the guard to the window, put your hand in your pocket, looking him in the eye significantly. He will carelessly drop his own hand within the window opening inside the car. You drop a shilling in the hand.

"This car is occupied."

"Quite so, sir."

Touching his hat, he locks the car door, and when other people come trying the door, he is conveniently out of the way, or informs the applicant, "Third carriage forward for London, sir," and by a dozen ingenious subterfuges keeps you free from strangers, so much that you betray yourself to him as an American by giving him another shilling at your journey's end; and, although smoking "is strictly forbidden in first-cla.s.s carriages," a party of three or four smokers, by the judicious use of a couple of shillings, may have one all to themselves for that purpose.

The railway stations in England are very fine, and much superior to those in America, although we are improving ours, especially in the great cities. In the great English cities and towns, the stations are vast iron, gla.s.s-roofed structures, kept in excellent order. The waiting-rooms are divided into first, second, and third cla.s.s, and the door opening upon the platform is not opened until a certain time before the train starts. Porters in uniform take the luggage to the train, and the "guard" who acts as conductor knows nothing about any railway train connections or line beyond his own. The pa.s.senger is supposed to know all that sort of thing, and he who "wants to know, you know," is at once recognized as an American.

The country stations are beautiful little rustic affairs, with gardens of roses and sweetbrier, honeysuckles and flowering shrubs about them.

Some have the name of the station sown in dwarf flowers upon the bank outside, presenting a very pretty appearance in spring and summer, and contrasting very agreeably with the rude shanties we find in America, with their tobacco-stained floors within, and bare expanse of yellow sand outside.

We rattled through Wales in an express train, a romantic view of wild Welsh mountains on one side, and the beating and heaving ocean dashing up on the other, sometimes almost to the very railway track. We ran through great tunnels, miles in length, whirled at the rate of fifty miles an hour through the great slate-quarrying district and Bangor, past the magnificent suspension bridge over Menai Straits, by the romantic old castle of Conway, with its shattered battlements and turrets looking down at the sea, which dashes up its foam-crested waves ceaselessly at its rocky base, the old red sandstone walls worn and corroded with time; on, past thatched huts, rustic cottages, and green landscape, till the panting train halted at the great modern railway station in that oldest of English cities, Chester.

This station is one of the longest in England, being ten hundred and fifty feet long, and having wings, a kind of projecting arcades, with iron roofs, to shelter vehicles waiting for trains. From this magnificent modern-built station a cab carried us, in a few minutes, on our route to the hotel (Grosvenor House), into an old street that looked as though we had got into a set scene at the theatre, representing a street in Windsor for Falstaff and the Merry Wives to appear in; houses built in 1500, or years before, the street or sidewalks pa.s.sing right under some of them; quaint old oddities of architecture, with curious inscriptions in abbreviated old English on their carved cross-beams, and their gables sticking out in every direction; curious little windows with diamond-shaped panes set in lead; and houses looking as though the hand of time had squeezed them together, or extracted the juice from them like sucked oranges, and left only the dried rind, half shrunken from its original shape, remaining.

The great curiosity, however, in Chester, is the Chester Cathedral, and the old walls that encompa.s.s the city. I never realized the force of the expression "the corroding tooth of time" till I saw this magnificent old cathedral: portions of it which were once sharply sculptured in various designs are now worn almost smooth by age, the old red sandstone looking as though time had sand-papered it with gritty hail and honeycombed its stones with melting rains; but the whole was surrounded with a mellow, softened beauty of groined arches, beautiful curves, dreamy old cloisters, and quaint carving, that invested even the ruined portion with a hallowed beauty. The stained-gla.s.s windows, both old and modern, are glorious colored wonders; the chapel where the services are now held is the same where, a thousand years ago, dreamy old monks told their beads; and there are their stalls or seats, so contrived as to afford but partial rest, so that if the sitter slumbered they fell forward with his weight, and threw him to the floor.

The antique wood carving upon the seats and pews here, now blackened and hardened almost to ebony in appearance, is very fine, excellently executed, and well preserved. High above ran around the nuns' walk, with occasional openings, whence the meek-eyed sisterhood could hear service below without being seen themselves as they came from their quiet cloisters near at hand, a quadrangle of one hundred and ten feet square, in which were four covered walks looking upon the enclosed garden, now a neglected greensward, where several forgotten old abbots slumber peacefully beneath great stone slabs with obliterated inscriptions.

The curious grope into some of the old cells, and most of us go down under the building in the crypt, where the ma.s.sive Gothic pillars, that support the pile, still in perfect preservation, bring vividly to mind those canvas representations of prison scenes one sees upon the stage.

Inside the cathedral were numerous very old monuments and mementos of the past; among others an immense tapestry wrought by nuns hundreds of years ago, and representing Elymas struck with blindness. The enormous size of these cathedrals strikes the "fresh" American tourist with wonder. Fancy churches five times as large as ours, and the height inside from sixty to one hundred feet from the stone floor to the arched ceiling, lighted with glorious great windows of stained gla.s.s, upon which the stories of the Bible are told in colored pictures, and south, east, west, transepts, nave, and choir, crowded with relics of the past, that you have read of in the story-books of youth, and again upon the pages of history in maturer years; artistic sculptures, old monuments, statues, carvings, and curious remains.

In the chapter-house connected with the cathedral, we were shown the colors carried by the Cheshire regiment on the field of Waterloo; and it was interesting for me to grasp with my sacrilegious American hand one of the colors borne by a British regiment in America during the war of the Revolution.

We also visited the ecclesiastical court-room in which the Bishop of Chester, in 1554, tried a Protestant minister, George Marsh, and sentenced him to be burned for heresy. The seats of the judges and chair of the accused are still preserved and shown to the visitor, who generally desires to sit in the martyr's seat, and finds it, even for a few minutes, an uncomfortable one.

The Chester Cathedral is said to have been founded in the year 200, and was used as a place of safety against the Danes in 800. It was well kept, and ruled by abbots, and its history well preserved from the time of King William Rufus, who was killed in New Forest, 1093, down to 1541.

The old walls of Chester are the great attraction of the city; in fact, Chester is the only city in Great Britain that has preserved its old walls entire: they enclose the city proper, and are about two miles in circ.u.mference, affording a delightful promenade and prospect of the surrounding country. The walls are squarely built of a soft red freestone, something like that used for our "brown stone front" houses, though apparently not so hard a material, and vary from twelve to forty feet in height. A fresh tourist from a new country like our own begins to feel he is communing with the past, as he walks over these old walls, erected A. D. 61, and finds their chronology to read thus:--

A. D.

61--Walls built by Romans.

73--Marius, King of the Britons, extended the walls.

607--The Britons defeated under the walls.

907--The walls rebuilt by daughter of Alfred the Great.

1224--An a.s.sessment for repairing the walls.

1399--Henry of Lancaster mustered his troops under these walls.

1645--The Parliamentary forces made a breach in these walls.

So that it will be seen they have looked down upon some of the most eventful scenes of history; and as we strolled along, thinking what a feeble obstacle they would prove against the formidable engines of modern warfare, we came to a tower called the Phoenix Tower; and an inscription upon it informs the visitor that upon this tower King Charles I. stood in 1645, and witnessed the defeat of his army on Rowton Moor, four miles off, then a barren field, but now a smiling plain of fields and cottages, looking very unlike a barren moor, or the scene of a sanguinary combat. In this old tower a curious, antiquary sort of old fellow keeps a motley collection of curiosities, among which were Havelock's spurs, buckles of Queen Mary's time, bean from tree planted by Washington (!), and a great, staring, size-of-life wood-cut of Abraham Lincoln, besides coins, relics, &c., that were labelled to interest, but whose genuineness might not stand the test of too close an investigation.

CHAPTER II.

It is a comparatively short ride from Chester to Liverpool, and of course we went to the Adelphi Hotel, so frequently heard mentioned our side of the water; and if ever an American desires a specimen of the tenacity with which the English cling to old fashions, their lack of what we style enterprise, let him examine this comfortable, curious, well kept, inconvenient old house, or rather collection of old residences rolled into a hotel, and reminding him of some of the old-fashioned hotels of thirty years ago at the lower part of the city of New York.

Upon the first day of my arrival I was inexperienced enough to come down with my wife to the "ladies' coffee-room" as it is called, before ordering breakfast. Let it be kept in mind that English hotels generally have no public dining and tea rooms, as in America, where a gentleman with ladies can take their meals; that solemn performance is done by Englishmen in the strictest privacy, except they are travelling alone, when they take their solitary table in "the coffee-room," and look glum and repellent upon the scene around at intervals of the different courses of their well-served solitary dinner. Public dining-rooms, however, are gradually coming into vogue at English hotels, and at the Star and Garter, Richmond, I dined in one nearly as large as that of the St. Nicholas, Fifth Avenue, or Parker House, crammed with chattering guests and busy waiters; but that was of a pleasant Sunday, in the height of the season, and the price I found, on settling the bill, fully up to the American standard.

But at the Adelphi I came down in the innocence of my heart, expecting to order a breakfast, and have it served with the American prompt.i.tude.

Alas! I had something to learn of the English manner of doing things.

Here was the Adelphi always full to overflowing with new arrivals _from_ America and new arrivals _for_ America, and here was its ladies'

coffee-room, a small square parlor with five small tables, capable of accommodating, with close packing, fifteen people, and the whole room served by one waiter. The room was full on my arrival; but fortunately, while I was hesitating what course to pursue, a lady and gentleman who had just finished breakfast arose, and we sat down at the table they had vacated.

In the course of ten minutes the waiter cleared the table and spread a fresh cloth. "'Ave you hordered breakfast, sir?"

"No! Bring me mutton chops, coffee, and boiled eggs, and hot biscuit, for two."

"Beg pardon, sir; chops, heggs, coffee--a--biscuits, aren't any _biscuits_, sir; send out and get some, sir."

Biscuits. I reflected; these benighted Britons don't understand what an American hot biscuit is. "No biscuits! Well, m.u.f.fins, then."

"m.u.f.fins, sir; yes, sir;" and he hastened away.

We waited five, ten, fifteen minutes; no breakfast. One party at another table, who were waiting when we came in, were served with their breakfast; in five minutes more a fresh plate of m.u.f.fins to another party; five more, and the waiter came to our table, put on two silver forks, a salt-cellar, and castor, and smoothed out some invisible wrinkles in the table linen, and went away; five minutes more, and he was hustling among some knives at a sideboard.

"Waiter!"