Miscellany: Letters From England

Playford Hall, ? June 27, 1844. $ Denr JjeavU-By (lie kind invitation of tlie patriarch of our cause, extended to tno immediately after tuy arrival in England, I tmi now at last under his hospifable roof. Thomas CJarkson was at work for the slave befo re you and Í were born. Sixty years of toil have bowed at last his noble fortn, and he now needs support in passing froni place to place. - He leaned upon my arm as he kindly howed me about liis mansión, and I need not say how happy I feit to aflord him that slight ministration. He has for ome years past been the subject of severe pain, which he thinks is abating. - His sight and hearing are also considerably impaired. But his mind is bright, and he maintains a lively interest in every thing pertaining to slavery, and expressed himself with great energy and animation. England is a wonderful country! I íim now i the heart of that district whcre laboring men with families, get only nine, eight, or seven shillings a week. where wlieat costs eigiif shillings per bushe', and where "incendiary fires" nredaily occurring. Yet it is a paradise of a country. Two days of lain have revived the vegetation, which was burning up with a two months' drought; and though spring crops have been greatly injured, the hopes of the farmers are raised for a tolerable erop of wheat and a good second erop of grass. Perhaps your amiable readers will follow me . through my day's journey, and use my peepers to look at spots where some of their ancestors toiled and died. - i have travelled through Essex and Suffolk, andseen such names as Deiham, and Ipswich, and Colchester, on finger boards. First, Idrove a bargain with a cab-man - poorshab'by fellow, who ought to patronize his tailor more.and his brewer less - for a ride of three miles, from Regent street to Shoreditch, all in 'the heart of London, to the station óf the EasternCounties raihvay. This station, which is ure common terminus of two railways, p'resents a massive and magnificent facade, of four lofty stori.es of stone, íílled vith the various raihvay offices. The systetn of doitig things, which I had half an hour's time to examine, seemed good, especially in-regard tothe interests of therailway companies. The passengere are made to divide themselves into three classes. The first class ride in cushionec carriages, and pay $3,50 for a ridc of fifty-one miles; the second class ride on bare painted boards, but under roof, anc pay $2,25; the third class ride in open cars. on benches, with little or no back, and pay $1,75. The booking offices are separate - the first and second class being divided by a railing, and the third being in another part of the building. - The tickets are all cut out of books resembling bank check books, so that the slumps are all left standing to testify to the tickets issued by each clerk. The tickets for the different way stations are cut out of books of different color. In this way it is scarcely possible for an officer to defraud the company without being detected. Our American system, on the other hand, exposes certain officers to terrible temptations. I have often wondered whether they were all as honest as they should be, when a little ingenuity would enable them to pocket a V or two daily, without the slightest chance of detection, unless they should detect thémselves by extravagance of expenditure. Indeed, I have heard of some of our companies dismissing officers on no other ground than that they were getting rich too fast! It is a remarkable feature of the monied institutions of this country - (perhaps I ought to except the estab lished church) - thát noüüngis trusted to honesly. Men are so ingeniously set to check each other, that peculation is just about impossible. Therefore our greater production of "defaulters" may arise not so much from a comparalive lack of honesty as frotn the abundance of our carelessncss. The car house is a fine specimen of the patent corrugated i ron roof. - This roof is simply sheet iron, fluted deeply, and bent into an elliptical arch. It re.sts upon a range of iron posts, on either side, without the least support in the centre, of pillar or king post. The iron posts are merely connected by cross liesor iron rods about an inch in diameter. The main central roof, I should judge, is about forty feet in span, and there are two others of twenty feet each, one on each side. The fluting, or corrugation, which, you will onderstand, runs over the roof, has the elïcct to strengthen it, the same as raftors. It is one of the neatest and most ingenious contrivances I have seen. Of course, the sheet iron is of sufficient thickness, and well painted on both sides. But I must be getting on the journey. The road is at first elevated on arches. and we are carried, whirling, quite above the red-tilted housetops and chimney pots of London, which stretch on for miles y et. The London population may mind their own business and not look out for the "locomotive when the be.ll rings," they having nothing to fear frpm it, unless it should come tumbling down from nloft, in which case it might pitch into somebody's garret. I noticed but one case in the 51 miles, in which a road was carried across the rails, and that seemed a rather private one, which was guarded by a gnte and a watchman. In all other cases the roadá are carried under orover. As the line is laid lower than ours and lias a much greater proportion ofexcavation than embankment, the roads mostly cross on bridges, which are built of brick. They are of the most faultless masoni'3?. W herever the road crosses obliquely, the arches are bevilled to fit, though this must greatly increase the expense. When the obliquity is so great that it would impair too much the strength of the arch, then there are brick abutmcnts and an iron bridge. So much to prevent a slight crook in the road aboe. Indeed, one is astonished continually at the labor and capital put into every thing here. Nothing is left rough, ragged, jagged or unfinished. The excavations, which are sloped down with marvellous precisión, and the embankménts, which are equally true, are all turfed wilh the utmost care; and near the station houses you see banks of ilowers that would do honor to a botanie garden. The servants of the company, who are sufficiently numerous, are all in uniform. Watchmen stand with fiags when the train passes the switches, like soldiers presenting arms, and then make a peculiar salaam or obeisance as the train leaves them. But I miss greally our fine social looking republican long cars. That is half the fun of travelling by rail. Quitting at last, we penétrate a fine, level, bowery agricullural country- The hedged inclosures are not large, and are cultivated to garden like perfection. Scarce as land is, the frees are spared with the most sacred regard, aud.the thatched cottages, of ever-varied ibrms, nestle among them with such snug cozinessas must i'aüen the soul of every landscape painter. Good heavens! can there be ill-lined stomachs and care,such as killed a cat, to the in mates of these delightful snuggeries? I mean to settle that qtiestion by personal observation. As we passed from Lonoon to Ipswitch, fifty-one miles by rail and eighteen by coach, I did not catch a gliinpse of any abode that was poor, mean or squalid, wilh the exception of one marvellous piece of thatched antiquity, where a family like John Rogers's was living in a house not good enough nor large enough for as many pigs. All the rest was, outwardly, half way to - Paradise. Chelmsford, a fine large town, expanding itself with new brick buildings, we saw. At the city of Colchester, finely seatcd on a hill, we took coach for Ipswich. The horses were high toned animáis, the leaders looking as if they had blood in them that had been nursed by the whole of the British hobility at Epsom or Ascot. And the way they did scamper up the hili in the dense city of Colchester, was a caution to the people to get out of the way - but not sufficient for oneold woman gathering manure in a basket, in the middleof the street, whom the driver cautioned by a loud hcy! and she dodged wilh her basket and looked around quite beat. The streets of this ancient city are smoothly macadamized, the side walks paved with smallish stones. The houses, built of all marmer of imperishable ïnaterials, hugely jut over into the narrow streets, and ve passed a venerable church. the square-battlemented tower of which was covered ar.d overtopped and most bewitchingly festooned with green ivy. O thou conservative ivy! Thou conservist many things, good and bad, besides that brick and mortar! In the midst of antiquity which seerned only to have been kept in repair for 500 years past, I noticed a lofty cut stone building, bearing the inscription, "In the seventh year of queen Victoria," with elabórate decorations, showing that things "go nhead" even here. At Stratford, no upon Avon, we passed another anlique and indescribable church. The smooth roads and cantering horses soon brought us to Ipowich, another ancient city, whcre I found Mr. Clarkson's carriage waitingr to convey me four or five miles to Playford Hall. This isa mansion which would Iodge a regiment. lts stout brick walls have stood foür hundred years, and are now covered with grapes, pears. nectarines and ornamental ivy, and it issurrounded by a moat thirty feet wide and eight feet deep. You approach the gate by an arched bridge. On two sides the gigantic buttresses of the house rise directly out o( the water, in which the pike and the tench are disporting themselves, and on which a large family of white ducks are accommodated to their hearts' content. - On two other sides a wall, hid with ivy and clumps of laurel, honej' suckles, &c. divides the moat from a level and smoothly shaven grass plot, which is bounded on its other two sides by the ancient L shaped mansión aforesaid, which was beginning to be old before Columbüs discovered America. Though of brick, the moss of centuries, the gothic windows, and turreted chimneys, make it venerable and fittingtothe mighty warrior who now reposes in it after a victory more glorïous than Wellington's. The veteran has showed me folios in which he wrote clown, with bis own hand, the masses of evidence which at various times he laid before the House of Commons, comprising, among other things, the muster-rolls of slave ships, containing the names of 20,000 seamen, from which he proved the destructive effects of the slave trade upon their health and lives. Mr. Clarkson's farmer, a hale looking young man, dressed in a black cotton velvet frock coat and breeches, with buckskin leggins buftoned up to the knees, took me over the 340 acres of which he superintends the cultivation. In spite of the long drought, the wheat looked well and large fields of barley not The wheat, he thöught, would yièld thirty-five bnshels to the acre, - they somefimes get fifty. It stood very thick, having been. sown with perfect regularity with the drill, two bushels of seed' to the acre. In all this part of England there is not a stone to impede the plough, and the furrows are drawn with the most perfect precisión. Indeed, all the ngribultural operations are pertect in a country where wheat . commands two dol ars a bushei, and laborers pressto be hiredat two dollars a week and find themselves. Nothingcan be more delightful than the soft shaded valleys and the gently swclling hills of this highly cultivated country. It is sprinkled over with quaint gothic churches, built long, long ago. - Playford church was built iii the time of he crusaders, and one of them is supposed to lie buried under it. The wnll?, which at the foundation of the towcr are ïot Iess than six feet thick, are composed of pebble sloncs from the size of a hen'segg to that of your fists, laid in cement, which makes a solid puddingstone of the whole. The church will accommodate two hundred people in ils deep old fashioned pew.s. From two of the monuments on the pavement, Oliver Cromwell took the idolatrous brass, but one cscaped, being concealed. The knight, however, whom it commemorates, is but n small gainer, for the present generation cannot make out the inscription, and are dependant upon an obscure tradition for even the name. But I am giving you an unconscionable long letter - sogood night - I am for bed.