The Racing season certainly causes more trouble and anguish of
mind to quiet men in racing time than it does of enjoyment to the devotees of races, and for this the Railway Companies are in great measure responsible. They treat their permanent passenger traffic with that mild indifference with which a girl treats her brothers when she has just got a lover. There is the South- Western Railway, for example ; not only does it make its regular morning passengers suffer terribly from enormous delays in their usual morning trains, but it actually declines to take them back at all to any station on the Reading line below Staines on the evening of the Ascot Cup day. It is using, we suppose, both lines of rail for " up " trains from Ascot to Staines, and for " down " trains from Ascot to Reading, and so cannot afford to attend to its regular passengers at all. If any unhappy man lives at Eghatn, Sunningdale, or beyond, he must sleep in town, or walk or ride all the way from Staines to his home. And then the horrors of the journey up to town the morning after cup day! The train comes up half-an-hour too late, stops at every station instead of going into town without stopping, nay, stops meditatively between the stations as well when the passengers put their heads out and the guard is sanguine of getting on again in a quarter of an hour or so! And to add to all the injuries of the journey, boys' schools packed in railway carriages are massed in force at specific points on the route, where they cheer idiotically as the train passes them at the rate of a languid walk.
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