When Sir Henry returned to the drawing-room, the pale-faced lady was gone; and, a few days afterwards, the _Morning Post_ announced among its departures that Miss Seymour had left London for the continent.
Bradshaw's _Continental Railway Guide_--the square, pale-yellow, compact, brochure which makes its appearance once a month, and which has doubled its thickness in its brief existence of five years--is suggestive of a multitude of thoughts concerning the silent revolution now passing over Europe. Presidents may have _coups d'état_; kings may put down parliaments, and emperors abrogate constitutions; Legitimists may dream of the past, and Communists of the future; but the _railways_ are marking out a path for themselves in Europe which will tend to obliterate, or at least to soften, the rugged social barriers which separate nation from nation. This will not be effected all at once, and many enthusiasts are disappointed that the cosmopolitanism advances so slowly; but the result is not the less certain in being slow.
Our facetious contemporary _Punch_ once gave a railway map of England, in which the face of the land was covered with intersecting lines at mutual distances of only a mile or two. A railway map of Europe has certainly not yet assumed such a labyrinthine character; still, the lines of civilisation (for so we may well term them) are becoming closer and closer every year. The outposts of Europe, where the Scandinavian, the Sclavonian, the Italian, and the Spaniard respectively rule, are scanty in their exhibition of such lines; but as we gradually approach the scenes of commercial activity, there do railways appear in greater and greater proximity. France strikingly exemplifies its own theory, that 'Paris is France,' by shewing how all its important railways spring from the metropolis in six directions. Belgium exhibits its compact net-work of railways, by which nearly all its principal towns are accommodated. The phlegmatic Dutchman has as yet placed the locomotive only in that portion of Holland which lies between the Rhine and the Zuiderzee. Rhineland, from Bâle to Wiesbaden, is under railway dominion. North Germany, within a circle of which Magdeburg may be taken as a centre, is railed pretty thickly; and Vienna has become a point from which lines of great length start. Exterior to all these are solitary lines, the pioneers of the new order of things, pointing in directions which will one day come within the yellow covers of Bradshaw. There is one line straggling out to Rostock; another to Stettin and Bromberg, on its way to Danzig; another to Warsaw, on its way to meet the czar at St Petersburg; another to Pesth, whence it will be carried through the scenes of the late Hungarian war; another to the neighbourhood of the Adriatic; others from Central Germany southward to the Swiss highlands, which bar further progress; and a very modest little group in North Italy.