Allen "knocked double knocks at the door of the Borough market, and took short naps on the steps alternately," under the impression that he lived there and had

BULL INN, ROCHESTER.

forgotten the key; and not very far off is Lant Street, in which the aforesaid party took place, and in which, so far as its appearance goes, Mr. Sawyer might very well be living to this

day. Probably modern medical students have peculiar idiosyncrasies of their own, but it is certain that they have greatly improved since Mr. Sawyer and Mr. Allen were fairly representative types. It may, by the way, be noted, as an odd instance of a sweeping but almost unnoticed change in our manners and customs, that Mr. Bob Sawyer is described, on his first introduction to Mr. Pickwick, as one of those "young gentlemen who smoke in the streets by day, shout and Scream in the same by night, call waiters by their

christian names, and do various other acts and deeds of an equally facetious description." Smoking in the streets by day was considered very "bad form " indeed in the Pickwick days-and in the days of Major Pendennis too, for the matter of that. The Major "was walking daintily

towards his apartment" in Bury Street, it will be remembered, when he met the Chevalier Strong as he "strode along the same pavement opposite to him. "Confound these young men : how they poison everything with their smoke' thought the Major, here comes a fellow with mustachios and a cigar. Every fellow who smokes and wears mustachios is a low fellow." Comparatively only a few years have passed, and lo! everybody smokes in the streets and everywhere else, and everybody wears the "mustachio," which, except when it adorned the countenance of a cavalry officer, was in the Pickwickian days looked upon with universal suspicion and distrust.

BULLINN ochester Good hovs. Nice beds

4

In the country places which Mr. Pickwick visited there have been almost as many changes as in London during the last fifty yearsperhaps in some cases even

more-but several Pickwickian landmarks remain practically unaltered. There is no "Marquis of Granby" at Dorking, it is true. Perhaps there never was one

THE LEATHER BOTTLE, COBHAM.

displays "a stone statue of some rampacious animal with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse,' although it is no longer necessaryanother, and a very valuable, reform this! -to order "" a bottle of the worst possible port wine, at the highest possible price,

"The Town INN

Dulwich

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Code 2

THE CROWN INN, DULWICH.

for the good of the house" and to drink brandy and water for one's own; the "Bull" at Rochester still, I am told, deserves Mr. Jingle's eulogium, "good house-nice beds;" and, notwithstanding that a part of the house was greatly damaged by fire a few years ago, the "Leather Bottle" still faces the beautiful old church at Cobham.

There have been many changes for the better at Bath, but the general appearance of the city still answers fairly well to the descriptions in Pickwick, and the old

Assembly Rooms, though a little faded and exhausted, are pretty much the same as they were in the palmy days of Angelo Cyrus Bantam, M.C. A couple of years ago, when I was reading in one of them, Mr. Oliver, the proprietor, showed me with great satisfaction the actual

spot where Mr. Pickwick played his disastrous rubber with Miss Bolo, Lady Snuphanuph, and Mrs. Colonel Wugsby. And, in connection with Bath, may be noted an odd topographical mistake. which was made by the author of Pickwick himself. When Mr. Winkle had his embarrassing experience with Mrs. Dowler and the sedan chair in Royal Crescent, it is recorded that he afterwards "tore round the Crescent hotly pursued by Dowler and the watchman," that he kept ahead, and that "the door was open as he came round the second time." Unfortunately, it is not possible to tear "round" Royal Crescent. When you get to one end of it you have perforce to turn and retrace your steps -a proceeding which would not have suited Mr. Winkle's book at all, as it would have landed him in the very arms of the infuriated Dowler. The fact is that in writing this description Charles Dickens confounded Royal Crescent with the Circus, which is close at hand, and in which the scene could easily enough have been enacted; and that, probably by some oversight, the mistake was never afterwards rectified.

October, 1891, was scarcely complete without some reference being made to those locomotives destined to take their place on the Great Western Railway; but it was not desirable, at that date, to speak of such examples of the new design as were then constructed, because these were running on temporary broad-gauge wheels and consequently might be looked upon as being in an imperfect state until reduced to their permanent proportions.

Thirty narrow-gauge engines have been built at Swindon, to run between London and Newton, and take up the work of those illustrious veterans which are now but a cherished, historic recollection. With the symmetry of the eight-feet singles still fresh in the mind, it is highly improbable that any one would be greatly biassed in favour of their successors, on the score of external beauty, save in so far as beauty may be said to lie in the adaptation of any piece of workmanship to the object for which it is fashioned. And yet they are veritable "greyhounds of the rail," even though their outward form does partake rather of the bull-dog type than of the make of the more slender quadruped; for there is no question that the new creations of Mr. Dean are exceedingly swift, powerful locomotives. This they

may well be, with pistons 20 inches in diameter, 24 inches in stroke, actuating driving wheels 7 feet 8 inches, by virtue of a boiler pressure of 160 lb.

Two features in their outline can hardly fail even at a distance to strike an ob

server:

(1) The high dome.

(2) The raised firebox.

(1) The history of domes on this railway is somewhat curious. The early engines had no domes upon their boilers, but some of them had, instead, upon their fireboxes, protuberances like great round dish-covers. Sir Daniel Gooch (then Mr.) subsequently to his "North Star" type (1837) adopted round-topped, square-bodied fireboxes in those engines constructed between the years 1844 and 1846, of which the first of the "Great Westerns" here illustrated by a fairly correct diagram may be cited as an example; but he abolished them once for all in his "Lord of the Isles " type, and his example seems to have been copied on the Bristol and Exeter Railway, the first of the 9 feet singles, built in 1856, having neither elevated firebox nor dome. In 1867 he was succeeded by Mr. Armstrong, who was an advocate of a dome upon the boiler; and from that time until the present, narrow-gauge engines adorned with brass cupolas have been more or less pre

survival from the past, reintroduced after partial abandonment in the narrow-gauge Great Western engines, and almost total abandonment elsewhere. It is strange to notice this feature preserved in a brandnew type; but its perpetuation certainly tends towards discounting that attribute of weakness which was conjectured to be incidental to any break at the heating end of the boiler. These raised fireboxes, however, are rather different from those on the broad gauge, in that, while being raised to a certain height at the top, they become gradually flattened at the sides, in order to allow the driving wheel to pass. Coming to closer quarters, and especially taking a view from between the front buffers, it is seen that these new specimens of Great Western workman

one. This theory may be correct within certain limits; and it may also be the case that the wear and tear of the line is lessened if the boiler is well elevated. Yet it is allowable to suggest that after all, the element of making a virtue of necessity may be far from absent in regard to this matter. For, given a large driving wheel-desirable in express work, to secure a reasonably low piston speedengines now-a-days can hardly be otherwise than high-pitched, unless a portion be scooped out from the under part of the boiler, so as to leave room for the revolu tion of the cranks, in cases where the axles possess cranks. Be this as it may, any one who has repeatedly watched the old broad-gauge heroes steaming grandly along, without visible jerk or

remarks were not wanting in the newspapers to the effect that the broad gauge

was

an "expensive and needless mistake;" but the plain truth is, that gauge was by no means so serious a mistake as to tie down the country to such a narrow gauge as unfortunately enjoys a monopoly on the iron road. The nowuniversal gauge (in England) was not only accidentally, but prematurely settled upon; it has no particular merit whatever to boast of, and its most zealous champions would in heart be glad enough at the present time,-with modern loads, modern speeds, and corridor trains looming in the near distance, to have more width for their engines, and more width for their carriages, if that were feasible. The broad gauge, like the Great Eastern steamship, was born before its time; but if it had been possible to increase within

the full dimensions of Mr. Brunel's marine monster may not yet be reached? A similar elasticity of growth on railways has, of course, been impossible, with a gauge fixed at haphazard, when there was little knowledge of railway economics, and locomotives were yet in their infancy.

Only one objection, carrying weight, has ever been urged against the broad gauge, per se, apart from primary cost of construction and maintenance of the permanent way; and this is, that the distance between the wheels gave a tendency to the crank-axles to twist. If the charge were well founded, one would think the difficulty could be met by constructing the crank-axles of stouter material; but in reference to this, it would be extremely interesting to have a return furnished. Broad-gauge engines when running have

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