ABSTRACT
As every city, village, or hamlet on the surface of the globe is usually inhabited by people of peculiar opinions, professions, character, tastes, fashions, follies, whims, and oddities, so there is always to be witnessed a corresponding variety in the allinement and architecture of their dwellings-the forms and excrescences of each often giving to the passing traveller a sort of phrenological insight into the character of the inmates. One street, inhabited by poor people, is as crooked as if it had been traced out by the drunken Irishman who, on being kindly questioned, in a very narrow lane across which he was reeling, as to the length of road he had travelled, replied, " Faith! it's not so much the length of it as the B R E A D T H of it that has tired me J" Another-a rich street —is quite straight. Here is a palace-there are hovels. The hotel is of one shape-the stock-exchange of another. There are private houses of every form-shops of every colour-columns, steeples, fountains, obelisks ad infinitum. Conspicuous over one door there is to be seen a golden pestle and mortar-from another boldly projects a barber's pole-a hatchment decorates a thirdthe Royal Arms a fourth-in short, it would be endless to enumerate the circumstantial evidence which in every direction proves the truth of the old saying, " Many men9 many minds
To all general rules, however, there are exceptions; and certainly it would be impossible for our most popular auctioneer, if he wished ever so much to puff off the appearance of Wolverton, to say more of it than that it is a little red-brick town composed of 242 little red-brick houses-all running either this way or that way at right angles-three or four tall red-brick engine-chimneys, a number of very large red-brick workshops, six red houses for officers-one red beer-shop, two red public-houses, and, we are glad to add, a substantial red school-room and a neat stone church, the whole lately built by order of a Railway Board, at a railway station, by a railway contractor, for railway men, railway women, and railway children ; in short, the round cast-iron plate over the door of every house, bearing the letters L. N. W. R., is the generic symbol of the town. The population is 1405, of whom 638 are below sixteen years of age ; indeed, at Wolverton are to be observed an extraordinary number of young couples, young children, young widows, also a considerable number of men who have lost a finger, hand, arm, or leg. All, however, whether whole or mutilated, look for support to " the Company," and not only their services and their thoughts but their parts of speech are more or less devoted to it:—for instance, the pronoun " she99 almost invariably alludes to some locomotive engine ; " he99 to " the chairman ," " it99 to the London Board. At Wolverton the progress of time itself is marked by the hissing of the various arrival and departure trains. The driver's wife, with a sleeping infant at her side, lies watchful in her bed until she has blessed the passing whistle of " the down mail." With equal anxiety her daughter long before daylight listens for the rumbling of " the 3^ A.M. goods up," on the tender of which lives the ruddy but smutty-faced young fireman to whom she is engaged. The blacksmith as he plies at his anvil, the turner as he works at his lathe, as well as their children at school, listen with pleasure to certain well-known sounds on the rails which tell them of approaching rest.
