24th July.
AFTER protracted negotiations with the railways concerned, the Peninsular and Oriental Company has at last succeded as hardly to require recognition. One in effecting a very desirable reform inj to incapacitate it from performing its the conditions of travel between Calais and Brindisi, much to the advantage of passengers by their Eastern mail steamers. Any ove who has made the journey in the mail-train, with its one over-crowded, comfortless_sleeping-carriage, under the old conditions—and there must be many such in Shanghai—will agree that the reform has come none too soon. That it should have been so long deferred is, no doubt, due to a difficulty in arranging acceptable terms with the lines over which the new ¢rain de luxe is to run, and if in the absence of definite information a conjecture may be hazarded, we are inclined to lay the charge of obstinacy at the door of the Italian Compames. In the first place the very idea of a high railway speed is foreign to the genius of the Italians. Che ya piano ya sano. Yo introduce the hurry-scurry of an express, which an Englishman would consider worthy of the name, among trains whose dignified jog-trot suits the native mind, was an alarming idea enough when it was first propose in connection with the Indian mail; and the price we had to pay for the innovation has always been one of the Postmaster-General's stock arguments against the reduction of eastern postage. The Italian Government, however, being paid a round sum per aunum as a sola: tim, resigned itself to the infliction of one such train each way per week. They still insisted—probably on account between the two Italian railway systems, the Mediterranean and the Adriatic—that the sleeping cars which ran all the way from Calais to Bologna should stop at that point and their passengers transfer themselves to other carriages, a piece of obstructiveness which added not a little to the discomforts of the journey. Recently, what with the imperative demand for increased passenger accom modation, and the growing bulk of the mail bays which have to be carried, the
that either both passengers and mails 0. Company became eouvineed must travel more slowly, that is leave London at an earlier hour than at resent, or they must be conveyed different trains. A similar conclusion, we may remark by the way, was arrived at some three or four years ago in connection with the mails between London and Scotland. These were previously conveyed chiefly by the limited mail, a train leaving Euston nightly at 8.50. The prestige with which this train was invested from the fact of its speed and punctuality, and doubtless the glamour shed over it by the limitation of the number of passengers it would carry, combined to render jit such a favourite with the travelling public, that its constitution had to be faltered, Instead of remaining aristo-erotically "first and second class only," like its brother the Wild Irishman, third class carriages were attached, as on other northern expresses, and its "o'er-grown bulk" became so intolerable as
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.