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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Mugby Junction, by Charles Dickens
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Mugby Junction
+
+
+Author: Charles Dickens
+
+Release Date: April 4, 2005  [eBook #1419]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MUGBY JUNCTION***
+
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall "Christmas Stories" edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+MUGBY JUNCTION
+
+
+CHAPTER I--BARBOX BROTHERS
+
+
+I.
+
+
+"Guard!  What place is this?"
+
+"Mugby Junction, sir."
+
+"A windy place!"
+
+"Yes, it mostly is, sir."
+
+"And looks comfortless indeed!"
+
+"Yes, it generally does, sir."
+
+"Is it a rainy night still?"
+
+"Pours, sir."
+
+"Open the door.  I'll get out."
+
+"You'll have, sir," said the guard, glistening with drops of wet, and
+looking at the tearful face of his watch by the light of his lantern as
+the traveller descended, "three minutes here."
+
+"More, I think.--For I am not going on."
+
+"Thought you had a through ticket, sir?"
+
+"So I have, but I shall sacrifice the rest of it.  I want my luggage."
+
+"Please to come to the van and point it out, sir.  Be good enough to look
+very sharp, sir.  Not a moment to spare."
+
+The guard hurried to the luggage van, and the traveller hurried after
+him.  The guard got into it, and the traveller looked into it.
+
+"Those two large black portmanteaus in the corner where your light
+shines.  Those are mine."
+
+"Name upon 'em, sir?"
+
+"Barbox Brothers."
+
+"Stand clear, sir, if you please.  One.  Two.  Right!"
+
+Lamp waved.  Signal lights ahead already changing.  Shriek from engine.
+Train gone.
+
+"Mugby Junction!" said the traveller, pulling up the woollen muffler
+round his throat with both hands.  "At past three o'clock of a
+tempestuous morning!  So!"
+
+He spoke to himself.  There was no one else to speak to.  Perhaps, though
+there had been any one else to speak to, he would have preferred to speak
+to himself.  Speaking to himself he spoke to a man within five years of
+fifty either way, who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire; a
+man of pondering habit, brooding carriage of the head, and suppressed
+internal voice; a man with many indications on him of having been much
+alone.
+
+He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain and by the
+wind.  Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him.  "Very well,"
+said he, yielding.  "It signifies nothing to me to what quarter I turn my
+face."
+
+Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o'clock of a tempestuous morning,
+the traveller went where the weather drove him.
+
+Not but what he could make a stand when he was so minded, for, coming to
+the end of the roofed shelter (it is of considerable extent at Mugby
+Junction), and looking out upon the dark night, with a yet darker spirit-
+wing of storm beating its wild way through it, he faced about, and held
+his own as ruggedly in the difficult direction as he had held it in the
+easier one.  Thus, with a steady step, the traveller went up and down, up
+and down, up and down, seeking nothing and finding it.
+
+A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black
+hours of the four-and-twenty.  Mysterious goods trains, covered with
+palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves
+guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their
+freight had come to a secret and unlawful end.  Half-miles of coal
+pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when
+they stop, backing when they back.  Red-hot embers showering out upon the
+ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires
+were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds
+invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their
+suffering.  Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the
+drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths
+too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their
+lips.  Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white
+characters.  An earthquake, accompanied with thunder and lightning, going
+up express to London.  Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in
+possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with
+its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar.
+
+Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train
+went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life.
+From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here
+it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him, and passing away
+into obscurity.  Here mournfully went by a child who had never had a
+childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense
+of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best
+years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful
+friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved.  Attendant, with many a
+clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim
+disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of
+a solitary and unhappy existence.
+
+"--Yours, sir?"
+
+The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been
+staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the
+chance appropriateness, of the question.
+
+"Oh!  My thoughts were not here for the moment.  Yes.  Yes.  Those two
+portmanteaus are mine.  Are you a Porter?"
+
+"On Porter's wages, sir.  But I am Lamps."
+
+The traveller looked a little confused.
+
+"Who did you say you are?"
+
+"Lamps, sir," showing an oily cloth in his hand, as farther explanation.
+
+"Surely, surely.  Is there any hotel or tavern here?"
+
+"Not exactly here, sir.  There is a Refreshment Room here, but--"  Lamps,
+with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly
+added--"but it's a blessed circumstance for you that it's not open."
+
+"You couldn't recommend it, I see, if it was available?"
+
+"Ask your pardon, sir.  If it was--?"
+
+"Open?"
+
+"It ain't my place, as a paid servant of the company, to give my opinion
+on any of the company's toepics,"--he pronounced it more like
+toothpicks,--"beyond lamp-ile and cottons," returned Lamps in a
+confidential tone; "but, speaking as a man, I wouldn't recommend my
+father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he'd be
+treated at the Refreshment Room.  Not speaking as a man, no, I would
+_not_."
+
+The traveller nodded conviction.  "I suppose I can put up in the town?
+There is a town here?"  For the traveller (though a stay-at-home compared
+with most travellers) had been, like many others, carried on the steam
+winds and the iron tides through that Junction before, without having
+ever, as one might say, gone ashore there.
+
+"Oh yes, there's a town, sir!  Anyways, there's town enough to put up in.
+But," following the glance of the other at his luggage, "this is a very
+dead time of the night with us, sir.  The deadest time.  I might a'most
+call it our deadest and buriedest time."
+
+"No porters about?"
+
+"Well, sir, you see," returned Lamps, confidential again, "they in
+general goes off with the gas.  That's how it is.  And they seem to have
+overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the platform.
+But, in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up."
+
+"Who may be up?"
+
+"The three forty-two, sir.  She goes off in a sidin' till the Up X
+passes, and then she"--here an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded
+Lamps--"does all as lays in her power."
+
+"I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement."
+
+"I doubt if anybody do, sir.  She's a Parliamentary, sir.  And, you see,
+a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun--"
+
+"Do you mean an Excursion?"
+
+"That's it, sir.--A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun, she mostly _does_ go
+off into a sidin'.  But, when she _can_ get a chance, she's whistled out
+of it, and she's whistled up into doin' all as,"--Lamps again wore the
+air of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best,--"all as lays in her
+power."
+
+He then explained that the porters on duty, being required to be in
+attendance on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless turn
+up with the gas.  In the meantime, if the gentleman would not very much
+object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept the warmth of his
+little room--The gentleman, being by this time very cold, instantly
+closed with the proposal.
+
+A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive, to the sense of smell, of a
+cabin in a Whaler.  But there was a bright fire burning in its rusty
+grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newly trimmed and
+lighted lamps, ready for carriage service.  They made a bright show, and
+their light, and the warmth, accounted for the popularity of the room, as
+borne witness to by many impressions of velveteen trousers on a form by
+the fire, and many rounded smears and smudges of stooping velveteen
+shoulders on the adjacent wall.  Various untidy shelves accommodated a
+quantity of lamps and oil-cans, and also a fragrant collection of what
+looked like the pocket-handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family.
+
+As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of his
+luggage) took his seat upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved hands
+at the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched with
+ink, which his elbow touched.  Upon it were some scraps of coarse paper,
+and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances.
+
+From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily to his
+host, and said, with some roughness:
+
+"Why, you are never a poet, man?"
+
+Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as he stood
+modestly rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedingly oily,
+that he might have been in the act of mistaking himself for one of his
+charges.  He was a spare man of about the Barbox Brothers time of life,
+with his features whimsically drawn upward as if they were attracted by
+the roots of his hair.  He had a peculiarly shining transparent
+complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application; and
+his attractive hair, being cut short, and being grizzled, and standing
+straight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted by some invisible
+magnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick.
+
+"But, to be sure, it's no business of mine," said Barbox Brothers.  "That
+was an impertinent observation on my part.  Be what you like."
+
+"Some people, sir," remarked Lamps in a tone of apology, "are sometimes
+what they don't like."
+
+"Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other.  "I have been
+what I don't like, all my life."
+
+"When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little
+Comic-Songs--like--"
+
+Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.
+
+"--To composing little Comic-Songs-like--and what was more hard--to
+singing 'em afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that
+time, it did indeed."
+
+Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps's eye, Barbox
+Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and
+put a foot on the top bar.  "Why did you do it, then?" he asked after a
+short pause; abruptly enough, but in a softer tone.  "If you didn't want
+to do it, why did you do it?  Where did you sing them?  Public-house?"
+
+To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside."
+
+At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby
+Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes.
+"She's got up!" Lamps announced, excited.  "What lays in her power is
+sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it's laid in her power to get up
+to-night, by George!"
+
+The legend "Barbox Brothers," in large white letters on two black
+surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent
+street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement
+half an hour, what time the porter's knocks at the Inn Door knocked up
+the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close
+air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed
+that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+"You remember me, Young Jackson?"
+
+"What do I remember if not you?  You are my first remembrance.  It was
+you who told me that was my name.  It was you who told me that on every
+twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called
+a birthday.  I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!"
+
+"What am I like, Young Jackson?"
+
+"You are like a blight all through the year to me.  You hard-lined, thin-
+lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on.  You are like
+the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you
+make me abhor them."
+
+"You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?"  In another voice from another
+quarter.
+
+"Most gratefully, sir.  You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition
+in my life.  When I attended your course, I believed that I should come
+to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy--even though I was still
+the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank
+in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day.  As I had
+done every, every, every day, through my school-time and from my earliest
+recollection."
+
+"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
+
+"You are like a Superior Being to me.  You are like Nature beginning to
+reveal herself to me.  I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of
+young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and
+you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them."
+
+"You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?"  In a grating voice from quite
+another quarter.
+
+"Too well.  You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and
+announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed.  You
+showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers.
+(When _they_ were, if they ever were, is unknown to me; there was nothing
+of them but the name when I bent to the oar.)  You told me what I was to
+do, and what to be paid; you told me afterwards, at intervals of years,
+when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became
+the Firm.  I know no more of it, or of myself."
+
+"What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?"
+
+"You are like my father, I sometimes think.  You are hard enough and cold
+enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son.  I see your scanty
+figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but you, too,
+wear a wax mask to your death.  You never by a chance remove it--it never
+by a chance falls off--and I know no more of you."
+
+Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in
+the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight.  And
+as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned grey too
+soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in the sun-light, an ashier
+grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.
+
+The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of
+the Public Notary and bill-broking tree.  It had gained for itself a
+griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation
+had stuck to it and to him.  As he had imperceptibly come into possession
+of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard Street, on whose
+grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years
+daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly
+found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential
+to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was
+never to be taken without his attested bond, whom all dealers with openly
+set up guards and wards against.  This character had come upon him
+through no act of his own.  It was as if the original Barbox had
+stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to
+be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a
+metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him.  The discovery--aided in
+its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the
+deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be
+married together--the discovery, so followed up, completed what his
+earliest rearing had begun.  He shrank, abashed, within the form of
+Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more.
+
+But he did at last effect one great release in his condition.  He broke
+the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley.  He
+prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from
+him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it.  With enough to live
+on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliterated the firm of
+Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-Office Directory and the face
+of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus.
+
+"For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up," he
+explained to Mugby High Street, through the Inn window, "and that name at
+least was real once.  Whereas, Young Jackson!--Not to mention its being a
+sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson."
+
+He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along on
+the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day's dinner
+in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of
+gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace.
+
+"There's Lamps!" said Barbox Brothers.  "And by the bye--"
+
+Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet
+three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing
+his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs.
+
+"Bedside?" said Barbox Brothers testily.  "Sings them at the bedside?  Why
+at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk?  Does, I shouldn't wonder.
+But it's no business of mine.  Let me see.  Mugby Junction, Mugby
+Junction.  Where shall I go next?  As it came into my head last night
+when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I
+can go anywhere from here.  Where shall I go?  I'll go and look at the
+Junction by daylight.  There's no hurry, and I may like the look of one
+Line better than another."
+
+But there were so many Lines.  Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the
+Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great
+Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that
+spun iron.  And then so many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, so
+crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them.  And then
+some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five
+hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant
+barrier, or turned off into a workshop.  And then others, like
+intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued
+round and came back again.  And then others were so chock-full of trucks
+of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, others were so
+gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled
+objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were so bright and
+clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle
+wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like
+their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end to
+the bewilderment.
+
+Barbox Brothers stood puzzled on the bridge, passing his right hand
+across the lines on his forehead, which multiplied while he looked down,
+as if the railway Lines were getting themselves photographed on that
+sensitive plate.  Then was heard a distant ringing of bells and blowing
+of whistles.  Then, puppet-looking heads of men popped out of boxes in
+perspective, and popped in again.  Then, prodigious wooden razors, set up
+on end, began shaving the atmosphere.  Then, several locomotive engines
+in several directions began to scream and be agitated.  Then, along one
+avenue a train came in.  Then, along another two trains appeared that
+didn't come in, but stopped without.  Then, bits of trains broke off.
+Then, a struggling horse became involved with them.  Then, the
+locomotives shared the bits of trains, and ran away with the whole.
+
+"I have not made my next move much clearer by this.  No hurry.  No need
+to make up my mind to-day, or to-morrow, nor yet the day after.  I'll
+take a walk."
+
+It fell out somehow (perhaps he meant it should) that the walk tended to
+the platform at which he had alighted, and to Lamps's room.  But Lamps
+was not in his room.  A pair of velveteen shoulders were adapting
+themselves to one of the impressions on the wall by Lamps's fireplace,
+but otherwise the room was void.  In passing back to get out of the
+station again, he learnt the cause of this vacancy, by catching sight of
+Lamps on the opposite line of railway, skipping along the top of a train,
+from carriage to carriage, and catching lighted namesakes thrown up to
+him by a coadjutor.
+
+"He is busy.  He has not much time for composing or singing Comic Songs
+this morning, I take it."
+
+The direction he pursued now was into the country, keeping very near to
+the side of one great Line of railway, and within easy view of others.  "I
+have half a mind,"' he said, glancing around, "to settle the question
+from this point, by saying, 'I'll take this set of rails, or that, or
+t'other, and stick to it.'  They separate themselves from the confusion,
+out here, and go their ways."
+
+Ascending a gentle hill of some extent, he came to a few cottages.  There,
+looking about him as a very reserved man might who had never looked about
+him in his life before, he saw some six or eight young children come
+merrily trooping and whooping from one of the cottages, and disperse.  But
+not until they had all turned at the little garden-gate, and kissed their
+hands to a face at the upper window: a low window enough, although the
+upper, for the cottage had but a story of one room above the ground.
+
+Now, that the children should do this was nothing; but that they should
+do this to a face lying on the sill of the open window, turned towards
+them in a horizontal position, and apparently only a face, was something
+noticeable.  He looked up at the window again.  Could only see a very
+fragile, though a very bright face, lying on one cheek on the
+window-sill.  The delicate smiling face of a girl or woman.  Framed in
+long bright brown hair, round which was tied a light blue band or fillet,
+passing under the chin.
+
+He walked on, turned back, passed the window again, shyly glanced up
+again.  No change.  He struck off by a winding branch-road at the top of
+the hill--which he must otherwise have descended--kept the cottages in
+view, worked his way round at a distance so as to come out once more into
+the main road, and be obliged to pass the cottages again.  The face still
+lay on the window-sill, but not so much inclined towards him.  And now
+there were a pair of delicate hands too.  They had the action of
+performing on some musical instrument, and yet it produced no sound that
+reached his ears.
+
+"Mugby Junction must be the maddest place in England," said Barbox
+Brothers, pursuing his way down the hill.  "The first thing I find here
+is a Railway Porter who composes comic songs to sing at his bedside.  The
+second thing I find here is a face, and a pair of hands playing a musical
+instrument that _don't_ play!"
+
+The day was a fine bright day in the early beginning of November, the air
+was clear and inspiriting, and the landscape was rich in beautiful
+colours.  The prevailing colours in the court off Lombard Street, London
+city, had been few and sombre.  Sometimes, when the weather elsewhere was
+very bright indeed, the dwellers in those tents enjoyed a pepper-and-salt-
+coloured day or two, but their atmosphere's usual wear was slate or snuff
+coloured.
+
+He relished his walk so well that he repeated it next day.  He was a
+little earlier at the cottage than on the day before, and he could hear
+the children upstairs singing to a regular measure, and clapping out the
+time with their hands.
+
+"Still, there is no sound of any musical instrument," he said, listening
+at the corner, "and yet I saw the performing hands again as I came by.
+What are the children singing?  Why, good Lord, they can never be singing
+the multiplication table?"
+
+They were, though, and with infinite enjoyment.  The mysterious face had
+a voice attached to it, which occasionally led or set the children right.
+Its musical cheerfulness was delightful.  The measure at length stopped,
+and was succeeded by a murmuring of young voices, and then by a short
+song which he made out to be about the current month of the year, and
+about what work it yielded to the labourers in the fields and farmyards.
+Then there was a stir of little feet, and the children came trooping and
+whooping out, as on the previous day.  And again, as on the previous day,
+they all turned at the garden-gate, and kissed their hands--evidently to
+the face on the window-sill, though Barbox Brothers from his retired post
+of disadvantage at the corner could not see it.
+
+But, as the children dispersed, he cut off one small straggler--a brown-
+faced boy with flaxen hair--and said to him:
+
+"Come here, little one.  Tell me, whose house is that?"
+
+The child, with one swarthy arm held up across his eyes, half in shyness,
+and half ready for defence, said from behind the inside of his elbow:
+
+"Phoebe's."
+
+"And who," said Barbox Brothers, quite as much embarrassed by his part in
+the dialogue as the child could possibly be by his, "is Phoebe?"
+
+To which the child made answer: "Why, Phoebe, of course."
+
+The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, and had
+taken his moral measure.  He lowered his guard, and rather assumed a tone
+with him: as having discovered him to be an unaccustomed person in the
+art of polite conversation.
+
+"Phoebe," said the child, "can't be anybobby else but Phoebe.  Can she?"
+
+"No, I suppose not."
+
+"Well," returned the child, "then why did you ask me?"
+
+Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up a new
+position.
+
+"What do you do there?  Up there in that room where the open window is.
+What do you do there?"
+
+"Cool," said the child.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"Co-o-ol," the child repeated in a louder voice, lengthening out the word
+with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say: "What's the use
+of your having grown up, if you're such a donkey as not to understand
+me?"
+
+"Ah!  School, school," said Barbox Brothers.  "Yes, yes, yes.  And Phoebe
+teaches you?"
+
+The child nodded.
+
+"Good boy."
+
+"Tound it out, have you?" said the child.
+
+"Yes, I have found it out.  What would you do with twopence, if I gave it
+you?"
+
+"Pend it."
+
+The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg to stand
+upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness, and
+withdrew in a state of humiliation.
+
+But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage, he
+acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod, not
+a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffident
+compromise between or struggle with all three.  The eyes in the face
+seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said: "Good-day
+to you, sir."
+
+"I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction," said Barbox Brothers
+with much gravity, after once more stopping on his return road to look at
+the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly.  "I can't make
+up my mind yet which iron road to take.  In fact, I must get a little
+accustomed to the Junction before I can decide."
+
+So, he announced at the Inn that he was "going to stay on for the
+present," and improved his acquaintance with the Junction that night, and
+again next morning, and again next night and morning: going down to the
+station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the
+avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings
+and outgoings of the trains.  At first, he often put his head into
+Lamps's little room, but he never found Lamps there.  A pair or two of
+velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire,
+sometimes in connection with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and
+meat; but the answer to his inquiry, "Where's Lamps?" was, either that he
+was "t'other side the line," or, that it was his off-time, or (in the
+latter case) his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not
+his Lamps.  However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now,
+but he bore the disappointment.  Nor did he so wholly devote himself to
+his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction as to neglect
+exercise.  On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same
+walk.  But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was
+never open.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streak of fine
+bright hardy autumn weather.  It was a Saturday.  The window was open,
+and the children were gone.  Not surprising, this, for he had patiently
+watched and waited at the corner until they _were_ gone.
+
+"Good-day," he said to the face; absolutely getting his hat clear off his
+head this time.
+
+"Good-day to you, sir."
+
+"I am glad you have a fine sky again to look at."
+
+"Thank you, sir.  It is kind if you."
+
+"You are an invalid, I fear?"
+
+"No, sir.  I have very good health."
+
+"But are you not always lying down?"
+
+"Oh yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up!  But I am not
+an invalid."
+
+The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake.
+
+"Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir?  There is a beautiful
+view from this window.  And you would see that I am not at all ill--being
+so good as to care."
+
+It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiring
+to enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden-gate.  It
+did help him, and he went in.
+
+The room upstairs was a very clean white room with a low roof.  Its only
+inmate lay on a couch that brought her face to a level with the window.
+The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light
+blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a
+fanciful appearance of lying among clouds.  He felt that she
+instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it
+was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily,
+and got it over.
+
+There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her
+hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.
+
+"I see now," he began, not at all fluently, "how you occupy your hand.
+Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon
+something."
+
+She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace.  A
+lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of
+her hands upon it, as she worked, had given them the action he had
+misinterpreted.
+
+"That is curious," she answered with a bright smile.  "For I often fancy,
+myself, that I play tunes while I am at work."
+
+"Have you any musical knowledge?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be
+made as handy to me as my lace-pillow.  But I dare say I deceive myself.
+At all events, I shall never know."
+
+"You have a musical voice.  Excuse me; I have heard you sing."
+
+"With the children?" she answered, slightly colouring.  "Oh yes.  I sing
+with the dear children, if it can be called singing."
+
+Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded
+the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned
+in new systems of teaching them?
+
+"Very fond of them," she said, shaking her head again; "but I know
+nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure
+it gives me when they learn.  Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars
+sing some of their lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a
+grand teacher?  Ah!  I thought so!  No, I have only read and been told
+about that system.  It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them
+so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little
+way.  You don't need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir," she
+added with a glance at the small forms and round the room.
+
+All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow.  As they still
+continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in
+the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of
+observing her.  He guessed her to be thirty.  The charm of her
+transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that they were
+passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful.
+Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have
+besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere
+compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an
+impertinence.
+
+He saw her eyes in the act of rising towards his, and he directed his
+towards the prospect, saying: "Beautiful, indeed!"
+
+"Most beautiful, sir.  I have sometimes had a fancy that I would like to
+sit up, for once, only to try how it looks to an erect head.  But what a
+foolish fancy that would be to encourage!  It cannot look more lovely to
+any one than it does to me."
+
+Her eyes were turned to it, as she spoke, with most delighted admiration
+and enjoyment.  There was not a trace in it of any sense of deprivation.
+
+"And those threads of railway, with their puffs of smoke and steam
+changing places so fast, make it so lively for me," she went on.  "I
+think of the number of people who can go where they wish, on their
+business, or their pleasure; I remember that the puffs make signs to me
+that they are actually going while I look; and that enlivens the prospect
+with abundance of company, if I want company.  There is the great
+Junction, too.  I don't see it under the foot of the hill, but I can very
+often hear it, and I always know it is there.  It seems to join me, in a
+way, to I don't know how many places and things that I shall never see."
+
+With an abashed kind of idea that it might have already joined himself to
+something he had never seen, he said constrainedly: "Just so."
+
+"And so you see, sir," pursued Phoebe, "I am not the invalid you thought
+me, and I am very well off indeed."
+
+"You have a happy disposition," said Barbox Brothers: perhaps with a
+slight excusatory touch for his own disposition.
+
+"Ah!  But you should know my father," she replied.  "His is the happy
+disposition!--Don't mind, sir!"  For his reserve took the alarm at a step
+upon the stairs, and he distrusted that he would be set down for a
+troublesome intruder.  "This is my father coming."
+
+The door opened, and the father paused there.
+
+"Why, Lamps!" exclaimed Barbox Brothers, starting from his chair.  "How
+do you do, Lamps?"
+
+To which Lamps responded: "The gentleman for Nowhere!  How do you DO,
+sir?"
+
+And they shook hands, to the greatest admiration and surprise of Lamp's
+daughter.
+
+"I have looked you up half-a-dozen times since that night," said Barbox
+Brothers, "but have never found you."
+
+"So I've heerd on, sir, so I've heerd on," returned Lamps.  "It's your
+being noticed so often down at the Junction, without taking any train,
+that has begun to get you the name among us of the gentleman for Nowhere.
+No offence in my having called you by it when took by surprise, I hope,
+sir?"
+
+"None at all.  It's as good a name for me as any other you could call me
+by.  But may I ask you a question in the corner here?"
+
+Lamps suffered himself to be led aside from his daughter's couch by one
+of the buttons of his velveteen jacket.
+
+"Is this the bedside where you sing your songs?"
+
+Lamps nodded.
+
+The gentleman for Nowhere clapped him on the shoulder, and they faced
+about again.
+
+"Upon my word, my dear," said Lamps then to his daughter, looking from
+her to her visitor, "it is such an amaze to me, to find you brought
+acquainted with this gentleman, that I must (if this gentleman will
+excuse me) take a rounder."
+
+Mr. Lamps demonstrated in action what this meant, by pulling out his oily
+handkerchief rolled up in the form of a ball, and giving himself an
+elaborate smear, from behind the right ear, up the cheek, across the
+forehead, and down the other cheek to behind his left ear.  After this
+operation he shone exceedingly.
+
+"It's according to my custom when particular warmed up by any agitation,
+sir," he offered by way of apology.  "And really, I am throwed into that
+state of amaze by finding you brought acquainted with Phoebe, that I--that
+I think I will, if you'll excuse me, take another rounder."  Which he
+did, seeming to be greatly restored by it.
+
+They were now both standing by the side of her couch, and she was working
+at her lace-pillow.  "Your daughter tells me," said Barbox Brothers,
+still in a half-reluctant shamefaced way, "that she never sits up."
+
+"No, sir, nor never has done.  You see, her mother (who died when she was
+a year and two months old) was subject to very bad fits, and as she had
+never mentioned to me that she _was_ subject to fits, they couldn't be
+guarded against.  Consequently, she dropped the baby when took, and this
+happened."
+
+"It was very wrong of her," said Barbox Brothers with a knitted brow, "to
+marry you, making a secret of her infirmity.'
+
+"Well, sir!" pleaded Lamps in behalf of the long-deceased.  "You see,
+Phoebe and me, we have talked that over too.  And Lord bless us!  Such a
+number on us has our infirmities, what with fits, and what with misfits,
+of one sort and another, that if we confessed to 'em all before we got
+married, most of us might never get married."
+
+"Might not that be for the better?"
+
+"Not in this case, sir," said Phoebe, giving her hand to her father.
+
+"No, not in this case, sir," said her father, patting it between his own.
+
+"You correct me," returned Barbox Brothers with a blush; "and I must look
+so like a Brute, that at all events it would be superfluous in me to
+confess to _that_ infirmity.  I wish you would tell me a little more
+about yourselves.  I hardly knew how to ask it of you, for I am conscious
+that I have a bad stiff manner, a dull discouraging way with me, but I
+wish you would."
+
+"With all our hearts, sir," returned Lamps gaily for both.  "And first of
+all, that you may know my name--"
+
+"Stay!" interposed the visitor with a slight flush.  "What signifies your
+name?  Lamps is name enough for me.  I like it.  It is bright and
+expressive.  What do I want more?"
+
+"Why, to be sure, sir," returned Lamps.  "I have in general no other name
+down at the Junction; but I thought, on account of your being here as a
+first-class single, in a private character, that you might--"
+
+The visitor waved the thought away with his hand, and Lamps acknowledged
+the mark of confidence by taking another rounder.
+
+"You are hard-worked, I take for granted?" said Barbox Brothers, when the
+subject of the rounder came out of it much dirtier than be went into it.
+
+Lamps was beginning, "Not particular so"--when his daughter took him up.
+
+"Oh yes, sir, he is very hard-worked.  Fourteen, fifteen, eighteen hours
+a day.  Sometimes twenty-four hours at a time."
+
+"And you," said Barbox Brothers, "what with your school, Phoebe, and what
+with your lace-making--"
+
+"But my school is a pleasure to me," she interrupted, opening her brown
+eyes wider, as if surprised to find him so obtuse.  "I began it when I
+was but a child, because it brought me and other children into company,
+don't you see?  _That_ was not work.  I carry it on still, because it
+keeps children about me.  _That_ is not work.  I do it as love, not as
+work.  Then my lace-pillow;" her busy hands had stopped, as if her
+argument required all her cheerful earnestness, but now went on again at
+the name; "it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my
+tunes when I hum any, and _that's_ not work.  Why, you yourself thought
+it was music, you know, sir.  And so it is to me."
+
+"Everything is!" cried Lamps radiantly.  "Everything is music to her,
+sir."
+
+"My father is, at any rate," said Phoebe, exultingly pointing her thin
+forefinger at him.  "There is more music in my father than there is in a
+brass band."
+
+"I say!  My dear!  It's very fillyillially done, you know; but you are
+flattering your father," he protested, sparkling.
+
+"No, I am not, sir, I assure you.  No, I am not.  If you could hear my
+father sing, you would know I am not.  But you never will hear him sing,
+because he never sings to any one but me.  However tired he is, he always
+sings to me when he comes home.  When I lay here long ago, quite a poor
+little broken doll, he used to sing to me.  More than that, he used to
+make songs, bringing in whatever little jokes we had between us.  More
+than that, he often does so to this day.  Oh!  I'll tell of you, father,
+as the gentleman has asked about you.  He is a poet, sir."
+
+"I shouldn't wish the gentleman, my dear," observed Lamps, for the moment
+turning grave, "to carry away that opinion of your father, because it
+might look as if I was given to asking the stars in a molloncolly manner
+what they was up to.  Which I wouldn't at once waste the time, and take
+the liberty, my dear."
+
+"My father," resumed Phoebe, amending her text, "is always on the bright
+side, and the good side.  You told me, just now, I had a happy
+disposition.  How can I help it?"
+
+"Well; but, my dear," returned Lamps argumentatively, "how can I help it?
+Put it to yourself sir.  Look at her.  Always as you see her now.  Always
+working--and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week--always
+contented, always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts.  I
+said, this moment, she was always as you see her now.  So she is, with a
+difference that comes to much the same.  For, when it is my Sunday off
+and the morning bells have done ringing, I hear the prayers and thanks
+read in the touchingest way, and I have the hymns sung to me--so soft,
+sir, that you couldn't hear 'em out of this room--in notes that seem to
+me, I am sure, to come from Heaven and go back to it."
+
+It might have been merely through the association of these words with
+their sacredly quiet time, or it might have been through the larger
+association of the words with the Redeemer's presence beside the
+bedridden; but here her dexterous fingers came to a stop on the
+lace-pillow, and clasped themselves around his neck as he bent down.
+There was great natural sensibility in both father and daughter, the
+visitor could easily see; but each made it, for the other's sake,
+retiring, not demonstrative; and perfect cheerfulness, intuitive or
+acquired, was either the first or second nature of both.  In a very few
+moments Lamps was taking another rounder with his comical features
+beaming, while Phoebe's laughing eyes (just a glistening speck or so upon
+their lashes) were again directed by turns to him, and to her work, and
+to Barbox Brothers.
+
+"When my father, sir," she said brightly, "tells you about my being
+interested in other people, even though they know nothing about me--which,
+by the bye, I told you myself--you ought to know how that comes about.
+That's my father's doing."
+
+"No, it isn't!" he protested.
+
+"Don't you believe him, sir; yes, it is.  He tells me of everything he
+sees down at his work.  You would be surprised what a quantity he gets
+together for me every day.  He looks into the carriages, and tells me how
+the ladies are dressed--so that I know all the fashions!  He looks into
+the carriages, and tells me what pairs of lovers he sees, and what new-
+married couples on their wedding trip--so that I know all about that!  He
+collects chance newspapers and books--so that I have plenty to read!  He
+tells me about the sick people who are travelling to try to get better--so
+that I know all about them!  In short, as I began by saying, he tells me
+everything he sees and makes out down at his work, and you can't think
+what a quantity he does see and make out."
+
+"As to collecting newspapers and books, my dear," said Lamps, "it's clear
+I can have no merit in that, because they're not my perquisites.  You
+see, sir, it's this way: A Guard, he'll say to me, 'Hallo, here you are,
+Lamps.  I've saved this paper for your daughter.  How is she a-going on?'
+A Head-Porter, he'll say to me, 'Here!  Catch hold, Lamps.  Here's a
+couple of wollumes for your daughter.  Is she pretty much where she
+were?'  And that's what makes it double welcome, you see.  If she had a
+thousand pound in a box, they wouldn't trouble themselves about her; but
+being what she is--that is, you understand," Lamps added, somewhat
+hurriedly, "not having a thousand pound in a box--they take thought for
+her.  And as concerning the young pairs, married and unmarried, it's only
+natural I should bring home what little I can about _them_, seeing that
+there's not a Couple of either sort in the neighbourhood that don't come
+of their own accord to confide in Phoebe."
+
+She raised her eyes triumphantly to Barbox Brothers as she said:
+
+"Indeed, sir, that is true.  If I could have got up and gone to church, I
+don't know how often I should have been a bridesmaid.  But, if I could
+have done that, some girls in love might have been jealous of me, and, as
+it is, no girl is jealous of me.  And my pillow would not have been half
+as ready to put the piece of cake under, as I always find it," she added,
+turning her face on it with a light sigh, and a smile at her father.
+
+The arrival of a little girl, the biggest of the scholars, now led to an
+understanding on the part of Barbox Brothers, that she was the domestic
+of the cottage, and had come to take active measures in it, attended by a
+pail that might have extinguished her, and a broom three times her
+height.  He therefore rose to take his leave, and took it; saying that,
+if Phoebe had no objection, he would come again.
+
+He had muttered that he would come "in the course of his walks."  The
+course of his walks must have been highly favourable to his return, for
+he returned after an interval of a single day.
+
+"You thought you would never see me any more, I suppose?" he said to
+Phoebe as he touched her hand, and sat down by her couch.
+
+"Why should I think so?" was her surprised rejoinder.
+
+"I took it for granted you would mistrust me."
+
+"For granted, sir?  Have you been so much mistrusted?"
+
+"I think I am justified in answering yes.  But I may have mistrusted,
+too, on my part.  No matter just now.  We were speaking of the Junction
+last time.  I have passed hours there since the day before yesterday."
+
+"Are you now the gentleman for Somewhere?" she asked with a smile.
+
+"Certainly for Somewhere; but I don't yet know Where.  You would never
+guess what I am travelling from.  Shall I tell you?  I am travelling from
+my birthday."
+
+Her hands stopped in her work, and she looked at him with incredulous
+astonishment.
+
+"Yes," said Barbox Brothers, not quite easy in his chair, "from my
+birthday.  I am, to myself, an unintelligible book with the earlier
+chapters all torn out, and thrown away.  My childhood had no grace of
+childhood, my youth had no charm of youth, and what can be expected from
+such a lost beginning?"  His eyes meeting hers as they were addressed
+intently to him, something seemed to stir within his breast, whispering:
+"Was this bed a place for the graces of childhood and the charms of youth
+to take to kindly?  Oh, shame, shame!"
+
+"It is a disease with me," said Barbox Brothers, checking himself, and
+making as though he had a difficulty in swallowing something, "to go
+wrong about that.  I don't know how I came to speak of that.  I hope it
+is because of an old misplaced confidence in one of your sex involving an
+old bitter treachery.  I don't know.  I am all wrong together."
+
+Her hands quietly and slowly resumed their work.  Glancing at her, he saw
+that her eyes were thoughtfully following them.
+
+"I am travelling from my birthday," he resumed, "because it has always
+been a dreary day to me.  My first free birthday coming round some five
+or six weeks hence, I am travelling to put its predecessors far behind
+me, and to try to crush the day--or, at all events, put it out of my
+sight--by heaping new objects on it."
+
+As he paused, she looked at him; but only shook her head as being quite
+at a loss.
+
+"This is unintelligible to your happy disposition," he pursued, abiding
+by his former phrase as if there were some lingering virtue of
+self-defence in it.  "I knew it would be, and am glad it is.  However, on
+this travel of mine (in which I mean to pass the rest of my days, having
+abandoned all thought of a fixed home), I stopped, as you have heard from
+your father, at the Junction here.  The extent of its ramifications quite
+confused me as to whither I should go, _from_ here.  I have not yet
+settled, being still perplexed among so many roads.  What do you think I
+mean to do?  How many of the branching roads can you see from your
+window?"
+
+Looking out, full of interest, she answered, "Seven."
+
+"Seven," said Barbox Brothers, watching her with a grave smile.  "Well!  I
+propose to myself at once to reduce the gross number to those very seven,
+and gradually to fine them down to one--the most promising for me--and to
+take that."
+
+"But how will you know, sir, which _is_ the most promising?" she asked,
+with her brightened eyes roving over the view.
+
+"Ah!" said Barbox Brothers with another grave smile, and considerably
+improving in his ease of speech.  "To be sure.  In this way.  Where your
+father can pick up so much every day for a good purpose, I may once and
+again pick up a little for an indifferent purpose.  The gentleman for
+Nowhere must become still better known at the Junction.  He shall
+continue to explore it, until he attaches something that he has seen,
+heard, or found out, at the head of each of the seven roads, to the road
+itself.  And so his choice of a road shall be determined by his choice
+among his discoveries."
+
+Her hands still busy, she again glanced at the prospect, as if it
+comprehended something that had not been in it before, and laughed as if
+it yielded her new pleasure.
+
+"But I must not forget," said Barbox Brothers, "(having got so far) to
+ask a favour.  I want your help in this expedient of mine.  I want to
+bring you what I pick up at the heads of the seven roads that you lie
+here looking out at, and to compare notes with you about it.  May I?  They
+say two heads are better than one.  I should say myself that probably
+depends upon the heads concerned.  But I am quite sure, though we are so
+newly acquainted, that your head and your father's have found out better
+things, Phoebe, than ever mine of itself discovered."
+
+She gave him her sympathetic right hand, in perfect rapture with his
+proposal, and eagerly and gratefully thanked him.
+
+"That's well!" said Barbox Brothers.  "Again I must not forget (having
+got so far) to ask a favour.  Will you shut your eyes?"
+
+Laughing playfully at the strange nature of the request, she did so.
+
+"Keep them shut," said Barbox Brothers, going softly to the door, and
+coming back.  "You are on your honour, mind, not to open you eyes until I
+tell you that you may?"
+
+"Yes!  On my honour."
+
+"Good.  May I take your lace-pillow from you for a minute?"
+
+Still laughing and wondering, she removed her hands from it, and he put
+it aside.
+
+"Tell me.  Did you see the puffs of smoke and steam made by the morning
+fast-train yesterday on road number seven from here?"
+
+"Behind the elm-trees and the spire?"
+
+"That's the road," said Barbox Brothers, directing his eyes towards it.
+
+"Yes.  I watched them melt away."
+
+"Anything unusual in what they expressed?"
+
+"No!" she answered merrily.
+
+"Not complimentary to me, for I was in that train.  I went--don't open
+your eyes--to fetch you this, from the great ingenious town.  It is not
+half so large as your lace-pillow, and lies easily and lightly in its
+place.  These little keys are like the keys of a miniature piano, and you
+supply the air required with your left hand.  May you pick out delightful
+music from it, my dear!  For the present--you can open your eyes now--good-
+bye!"
+
+In his embarrassed way, he closed the door upon himself, and only saw, in
+doing so, that she ecstatically took the present to her bosom and
+caressed it.  The glimpse gladdened his heart, and yet saddened it; for
+so might she, if her youth had flourished in its natural course, having
+taken to her breast that day the slumbering music of her own child's
+voice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--BARBOX BROTHERS AND CO.
+
+
+With good-will and earnest purpose, the gentleman for Nowhere began, on
+the very next day, his researches at the heads of the seven roads.  The
+results of his researches, as he and Phoebe afterwards set them down in
+fair writing, hold their due places in this veracious chronicle.  But
+they occupied a much longer time in the getting together than they ever
+will in the perusal.  And this is probably the case with most reading
+matter, except when it is of that highly beneficial kind (for Posterity)
+which is "thrown off in a few moments of leisure" by the superior poetic
+geniuses who scorn to take prose pains.
+
+It must be admitted, however, that Barbox by no means hurried himself.
+His heart being in his work of good-nature, he revelled in it.  There was
+the joy, too (it was a true joy to him), of sometimes sitting by,
+listening to Phoebe as she picked out more and more discourse from her
+musical instrument, and as her natural taste and ear refined daily upon
+her first discoveries.  Besides being a pleasure, this was an occupation,
+and in the course of weeks it consumed hours.  It resulted that his
+dreaded birthday was close upon him before he had troubled himself any
+more about it.
+
+The matter was made more pressing by the unforeseen circumstance that the
+councils held (at which Mr. Lamps, beaming most brilliantly, on a few
+rare occasions assisted) respecting the road to be selected were, after
+all, in nowise assisted by his investigations.  For, he had connected
+this interest with this road, or that interest with the other, but could
+deduce no reason from it for giving any road the preference.
+Consequently, when the last council was holden, that part of the business
+stood, in the end, exactly where it had stood in the beginning.
+
+"But, sir," remarked Phoebe, "we have only six roads after all.  Is the
+seventh road dumb?"
+
+"The seventh road?  Oh!" said Barbox Brothers, rubbing his chin.  "That
+is the road I took, you know, when I went to get your little present.
+That is _its_ story.  Phoebe."
+
+"Would you mind taking that road again, sir?" she asked with hesitation.
+
+"Not in the least; it is a great high-road after all."
+
+"I should like you to take it," returned Phoebe with a persuasive smile,
+"for the love of that little present which must ever be so dear to me.  I
+should like you to take it, because that road can never be again like any
+other road to me.  I should like you to take it, in remembrance of your
+having done me so much good: of your having made me so much happier!  If
+you leave me by the road you travelled when you went to do me this great
+kindness," sounding a faint chord as she spoke, "I shall feel, lying here
+watching at my window, as if it must conduct you to a prosperous end, and
+bring you back some day."
+
+"It shall be done, my dear; it shall be done."
+
+So at last the gentleman for Nowhere took a ticket for Somewhere, and his
+destination was the great ingenious town.
+
+He had loitered so long about the Junction that it was the eighteenth of
+December when he left it.  "High time," he reflected, as he seated
+himself in the train, "that I started in earnest!  Only one clear day
+remains between me and the day I am running away from.  I'll push onward
+for the hill-country to-morrow.  I'll go to Wales."
+
+It was with some pains that he placed before himself the undeniable
+advantages to be gained in the way of novel occupation for his senses
+from misty mountains, swollen streams, rain, cold, a wild seashore, and
+rugged roads.  And yet he scarcely made them out as distinctly as he
+could have wished.  Whether the poor girl, in spite of her new resource,
+her music, would have any feeling of loneliness upon her now--just at
+first--that she had not had before; whether she saw those very puffs of
+steam and smoke that he saw, as he sat in the train thinking of her;
+whether her face would have any pensive shadow on it as they died out of
+the distant view from her window; whether, in telling him he had done her
+so much good, she had not unconsciously corrected his old moody bemoaning
+of his station in life, by setting him thinking that a man might be a
+great healer, if he would, and yet not be a great doctor; these and other
+similar meditations got between him and his Welsh picture.  There was
+within him, too, that dull sense of vacuity which follows separation from
+an object of interest, and cessation of a pleasant pursuit; and this
+sense, being quite new to him, made him restless.  Further, in losing
+Mugby Junction, he had found himself again; and he was not the more
+enamoured of himself for having lately passed his time in better company.
+
+But surely here, not far ahead, must be the great ingenious town.  This
+crashing and clashing that the train was undergoing, and this coupling on
+to it of a multitude of new echoes, could mean nothing less than approach
+to the great station.  It did mean nothing less.  After some stormy
+flashes of town lightning, in the way of swift revelations of red brick
+blocks of houses, high red brick chimney-shafts, vistas of red brick
+railway arches, tongues of fire, blocks of smoke, valleys of canal, and
+hills if coal, there came the thundering in at the journey's end.
+
+Having seen his portmanteaus safely housed in the hotel he chose, and
+having appointed his dinner hour, Barbox Brothers went out for a walk in
+the busy streets.  And now it began to be suspected by him that Mugby
+Junction was a Junction of many branches, invisible as well as visible,
+and had joined him to an endless number of by-ways.  For, whereas he
+would, but a little while ago, have walked these streets blindly
+brooding, he now had eyes and thoughts for a new external world.  How the
+many toiling people lived, and loved, and died; how wonderful it was to
+consider the various trainings of eye and hand, the nice distinctions of
+sight and touch, that separated them into classes of workers, and even
+into classes of workers at subdivisions of one complete whole which
+combined their many intelligences and forces, though of itself but some
+cheap object of use or ornament in common life; how good it was to know
+that such assembling in a multitude on their part, and such contribution
+of their several dexterities towards a civilising end, did not
+deteriorate them as it was the fashion of the supercilious Mayflies of
+humanity to pretend, but engendered among them a self-respect, and yet a
+modest desire to be much wiser than they were (the first evinced in their
+well-balanced bearing and manner of speech when he stopped to ask a
+question; the second, in the announcements of their popular studies and
+amusements on the public walls); these considerations, and a host of
+such, made his walk a memorable one.  "I too am but a little part of a
+great whole," he began to think; "and to be serviceable to myself and
+others, or to be happy, I must cast my interest into, and draw it out of,
+the common stock."
+
+Although he had arrived at his journey's end for the day by noon, he had
+since insensibly walked about the town so far and so long that the lamp-
+lighters were now at their work in the streets, and the shops were
+sparkling up brilliantly.  Thus reminded to turn towards his quarters, he
+was in the act of doing so, when a very little hand crept into his, and a
+very little voice said:
+
+"Oh! if you please, I am lost!"
+
+He looked down, and saw a very little fair-haired girl.
+
+"Yes," she said, confirming her words with a serious nod.  "I am indeed.
+I am lost!"
+
+Greatly perplexed, he stopped, looked about him for help, descried none,
+and said, bending low.
+
+"Where do you live, my child?"
+
+"I don't know where I live," she returned.  "I am lost."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Polly."
+
+"What is your other name?"
+
+The reply was prompt, but unintelligible.
+
+Imitating the sound as he caught it, he hazarded the guess, "Trivits."
+
+"Oh no!" said the child, shaking her head.  "Nothing like that."
+
+"Say it again, little one."
+
+An unpromising business.  For this time it had quite a different sound.
+
+He made the venture, "Paddens?"
+
+"Oh no!" said the child.  "Nothing like that."
+
+"Once more.  Let us try it again, dear."
+
+A most hopeless business.  This time it swelled into four syllables.  "It
+can't be Tappitarver?" said Barbox Brothers, rubbing his head with his
+hat in discomfiture.
+
+"No!  It ain't," the child quietly assented.
+
+On her trying this unfortunate name once more, with extraordinary efforts
+at distinctness, it swelled into eight syllables at least.
+
+"Ah!  I think," said Barbox Brothers with a desperate air of resignation,
+"that we had better give it up."
+
+"But I am lost," said the child, nestling her little hand more closely in
+his, "and you'll take care of me, won't you?"
+
+If ever a man were disconcerted by division between compassion on the one
+hand, and the very imbecility of irresolution on the other, here the man
+was.  "Lost!" he repeated, looking down at the child.  "I am sure _I_ am.
+What is to be done?"
+
+"Where do you live?" asked the child, looking up at him wistfully.
+
+"Over there," he answered, pointing vaguely in the direction of his
+hotel.
+
+"Hadn't we better go there?" said the child.
+
+"Really," he replied, "I don't know but what we had."
+
+So they set off, hand-in-hand.  He, through comparison of himself against
+his little companion, with a clumsy feeling on him as if he had just
+developed into a foolish giant.  She, clearly elevated in her own tiny
+opinion by having got him so neatly out of his embarrassment.
+
+"We are going to have dinner when we get there, I suppose?" said Polly.
+
+"Well," he rejoined, "I--Yes, I suppose we are."
+
+"Do you like your dinner?" asked the child.
+
+"Why, on the whole," said Barbox Brothers, "yes, I think I do."
+
+"I do mine," said Polly.  "Have you any brothers and sisters?"
+
+"No.  Have you?"
+
+"Mine are dead."
+
+"Oh!" said Barbox Brothers.  With that absurd sense of unwieldiness of
+mind and body weighing him down, he would have not known how to pursue
+the conversation beyond this curt rejoinder, but that the child was
+always ready for him.
+
+"What," she asked, turning her soft hand coaxingly in his, "are you going
+to do to amuse me after dinner?"
+
+"Upon my soul, Polly," exclaimed Barbox Brothers, very much at a loss, "I
+have not the slightest idea!"
+
+"Then I tell you what," said Polly.  "Have you got any cards at your
+house?"
+
+"Plenty," said Barbox Brothers in a boastful vein.
+
+"Very well.  Then I'll build houses, and you shall look at me.  You
+mustn't blow, you know."
+
+"Oh no," said Barbox Brothers.  "No, no, no.  No blowing.  Blowing's not
+fair."
+
+He flattered himself that he had said this pretty well for an idiotic
+monster; but the child, instantly perceiving the awkwardness of his
+attempt to adapt himself to her level, utterly destroyed his hopeful
+opinion of himself by saying compassionately: "What a funny man you are!"
+
+Feeling, after this melancholy failure, as if he every minute grew bigger
+and heavier in person, and weaker in mind, Barbox gave himself up for a
+bad job.  No giant ever submitted more meekly to be led in triumph by all-
+conquering Jack than he to be bound in slavery to Polly.
+
+"Do you know any stories?" she asked him.
+
+He was reduced to the humiliating confession: "No."
+
+"What a dunce you must be, mustn't you?" said Polly.
+
+He was reduced to the humiliating confession: "Yes."
+
+"Would you like me to teach you a story?  But you must remember it, you
+know, and be able to tell it right to somebody else afterwards."
+
+He professed that it would afford him the highest mental gratification to
+be taught a story, and that he would humbly endeavour to retain it in his
+mind.  Whereupon Polly, giving her hand a new little turn in his,
+expressive of settling down for enjoyment, commenced a long romance, of
+which every relishing clause began with the words: "So this," or, "And so
+this."  As, "So this boy;" or, "So this fairy;" or, "And so this pie was
+four yards round, and two yards and a quarter deep."  The interest of the
+romance was derived from the intervention of this fairy to punish this
+boy for having a greedy appetite.  To achieve which purpose, this fairy
+made this pie, and this boy ate and ate and ate, and his cheeks swelled
+and swelled and swelled.  There were many tributary circumstances, but
+the forcible interest culminated in the total consumption of this pie,
+and the bursting of this boy.  Truly he was a fine sight, Barbox
+Brothers, with serious attentive face, and ear bent down, much jostled on
+the pavements of the busy town, but afraid of losing a single incident of
+the epic, lest he should be examined in it by-and-by, and found
+deficient.
+
+Thus they arrived at the hotel.  And there he had to say at the bar, and
+said awkwardly enough; "I have found a little girl!"
+
+The whole establishment turned out to look at the little girl.  Nobody
+knew her; nobody could make out her name, as she set it forth--except one
+chamber-maid, who said it was Constantinople--which it wasn't.
+
+"I will dine with my young friend in a private room," said Barbox
+Brothers to the hotel authorities, "and perhaps you will be so good as to
+let the police know that the pretty baby is here.  I suppose she is sure
+to be inquired for soon, if she has not been already.  Come along,
+Polly."
+
+Perfectly at ease and peace, Polly came along, but, finding the stairs
+rather stiff work, was carried up by Barbox Brothers.  The dinner was a
+most transcendant success, and the Barbox sheepishness, under Polly's
+directions how to mince her meat for her, and how to diffuse gravy over
+the plate with a liberal and equal hand, was another fine sight.
+
+"And now," said Polly, "while we are at dinner, you be good, and tell me
+that story I taught you."
+
+With the tremors of a Civil Service examination upon him, and very
+uncertain indeed, not only as to the epoch at which the pie appeared in
+history, but also as to the measurements of that indispensable fact,
+Barbox Brothers made a shaky beginning, but under encouragement did very
+fairly.  There was a want of breadth observable in his rendering of the
+cheeks, as well as the appetite, of the boy; and there was a certain
+tameness in his fairy, referable to an under-current of desire to account
+for her.  Still, as the first lumbering performance of a good-humoured
+monster, it passed muster.
+
+"I told you to be good," said Polly, "and you are good, ain't you?"
+
+"I hope so," replied Barbox Brothers.
+
+Such was his deference that Polly, elevated on a platform of sofa
+cushions in a chair at his right hand, encouraged him with a pat or two
+on the face from the greasy bowl of her spoon, and even with a gracious
+kiss.  In getting on her feet upon her chair, however, to give him this
+last reward, she toppled forward among the dishes, and caused him to
+exclaim, as he effected her rescue: "Gracious Angels!  Whew!  I thought
+we were in the fire, Polly!"
+
+"What a coward you are, ain't you?" said Polly when replaced.
+
+"Yes, I am rather nervous," he replied.  "Whew!  Don't, Polly!  Don't
+flourish your spoon, or you'll go over sideways.  Don't tilt up your legs
+when you laugh, Polly, or you'll go over backwards.  Whew!  Polly, Polly,
+Polly," said Barbox Brothers, nearly succumbing to despair, "we are
+environed with dangers!"
+
+Indeed, he could descry no security from the pitfalls that were yawning
+for Polly, but in proposing to her, after dinner, to sit upon a low
+stool.  "I will, if you will," said Polly.  So, as peace of mind should
+go before all, he begged the waiter to wheel aside the table, bring a
+pack of cards, a couple of footstools, and a screen, and close in Polly
+and himself before the fire, as it were in a snug room within the room.
+Then, finest sight of all, was Barbox Brothers on his footstool, with a
+pint decanter on the rug, contemplating Polly as she built successfully,
+and growing blue in the face with holding his breath, lest he should blow
+the house down.
+
+"How you stare, don't you?" said Polly in a houseless pause.
+
+Detected in the ignoble fact, he felt obliged to admit, apologetically:
+
+"I am afraid I was looking rather hard at you, Polly."
+
+"Why do you stare?" asked Polly.
+
+"I cannot," he murmured to himself, "recall why.--I don't know, Polly."
+
+"You must be a simpleton to do things and not know why, mustn't you?"
+said Polly.
+
+In spite of which reproof, he looked at the child again intently, as she
+bent her head over her card structure, her rich curls shading her face.
+"It is impossible," he thought, "that I can ever have seen this pretty
+baby before.  Can I have dreamed of her?  In some sorrowful dream?"
+
+He could make nothing of it.  So he went into the building trade as a
+journeyman under Polly, and they built three stories high, four stories
+high; even five.
+
+"I say!  Who do you think is coming?" asked Polly, rubbing her eyes after
+tea.
+
+He guessed: "The waiter?"
+
+"No," said Polly, "the dustman.  I am getting sleepy."
+
+A new embarrassment for Barbox Brothers!
+
+"I don't think I am going to be fetched to-night," said Polly.  "What do
+you think?"
+
+He thought not, either.  After another quarter of an hour, the dustman
+not merely impending, but actually arriving, recourse was had to the
+Constantinopolitan chamber-maid: who cheerily undertook that the child
+should sleep in a comfortable and wholesome room, which she herself would
+share.
+
+"And I know you will be careful, won't you," said Barbox Brothers, as a
+new fear dawned upon him, "that she don't fall out of bed?"
+
+Polly found this so highly entertaining that she was under the necessity
+of clutching him round the neck with both arms as he sat on his footstool
+picking up the cards, and rocking him to and fro, with her dimpled chin
+on his shoulder.
+
+"Oh, what a coward you are, ain't you?" said Polly.  "Do you fall out of
+bed?"
+
+"N--not generally, Polly."
+
+"No more do I."
+
+With that, Polly gave him a reassuring hug or two to keep him going, and
+then giving that confiding mite of a hand of hers to be swallowed up in
+the hand of the Constantinopolitan chamber-maid, trotted off, chattering,
+without a vestige of anxiety.
+
+He looked after her, had the screen removed and the table and chairs
+replaced, and still looked after her.  He paced the room for half an
+hour.  "A most engaging little creature, but it's not that.  A most
+winning little voice, but it's not that.  That has much to do with it,
+but there is something more.  How can it be that I seem to know this
+child?  What was it she imperfectly recalled to me when I felt her touch
+in the street, and, looking down at her, saw her looking up at me?"
+
+"Mr. Jackson!"
+
+With a start he turned towards the sound of the subdued voice, and saw
+his answer standing at the door.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Jackson, do not be severe with me!  Speak a word of
+encouragement to me, I beseech you."
+
+"You are Polly's mother."
+
+"Yes."
+
+Yes.  Polly herself might come to this, one day.  As you see what the
+rose was in its faded leaves; as you see what the summer growth of the
+woods was in their wintry branches; so Polly might be traced, one day, in
+a careworn woman like this, with her hair turned grey.  Before him were
+the ashes of a dead fire that had once burned bright.  This was the woman
+he had loved.  This was the woman he had lost.  Such had been the
+constancy of his imagination to her, so had Time spared her under its
+withholding, that now, seeing how roughly the inexorable hand had struck
+her, his soul was filled with pity and amazement.
+
+He led her to a chair, and stood leaning on a corner of the
+chimney-piece, with his head resting on his hand, and his face half
+averted.
+
+"Did you see me in the street, and show me to your child?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Is the little creature, then, a party to deceit?"
+
+"I hope there is no deceit.  I said to her, 'We have lost our way, and I
+must try to find mine by myself.  Go to that gentleman, and tell him you
+are lost.  You shall be fetched by-and-by.'  Perhaps you have not thought
+how very young she is?"
+
+"She is very self-reliant."
+
+"Perhaps because she is so young."
+
+He asked, after a short pause, "Why did you do this?"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Jackson, do you ask me?  In the hope that you might see
+something in my innocent child to soften your heart towards me.  Not only
+towards me, but towards my husband."
+
+He suddenly turned about, and walked to the opposite end of the room.  He
+came back again with a slower step, and resumed his former attitude,
+saying:
+
+"I thought you had emigrated to America?"
+
+"We did.  But life went ill with us there, and we came back."
+
+"Do you live in this town?"
+
+"Yes.  I am a daily teacher of music here.  My husband is a book-keeper."
+
+"Are you--forgive my asking--poor?"
+
+"We earn enough for our wants.  That is not our distress.  My husband is
+very, very ill of a lingering disorder.  He will never recover--"
+
+"You check yourself.  If it is for want of the encouraging word you spoke
+of, take it from me.  I cannot forget the old time, Beatrice."
+
+"God bless you!" she replied with a burst of tears, and gave him her
+trembling hand.
+
+"Compose yourself.  I cannot be composed if you are not, for to see you
+weep distresses me beyond expression.  Speak freely to me.  Trust me."
+
+She shaded her face with her veil, and after a little while spoke calmly.
+Her voice had the ring of Polly's.
+
+"It is not that my husband's mind is at all impaired by his bodily
+suffering, for I assure you that is not the case.  But in his weakness,
+and in his knowledge that he is incurably ill, he cannot overcome the
+ascendancy of one idea.  It preys upon him, embitters every moment of his
+painful life, and will shorten it."
+
+She stopping, he said again: "Speak freely to me.  Trust me."
+
+"We have had five children before this darling, and they all lie in their
+little graves.  He believes that they have withered away under a curse,
+and that it will blight this child like the rest."
+
+"Under what curse?"
+
+"Both I and he have it on our conscience that we tried you very heavily,
+and I do not know but that, if I were as ill as he, I might suffer in my
+mind as he does.  This is the constant burden:--'I believe, Beatrice, I
+was the only friend that Mr. Jackson ever cared to make, though I was so
+much his junior.  The more influence he acquired in the business, the
+higher he advanced me, and I was alone in his private confidence.  I came
+between him and you, and I took you from him.  We were both secret, and
+the blow fell when he was wholly unprepared.  The anguish it caused a man
+so compressed must have been terrible; the wrath it awakened
+inappeasable.  So, a curse came to be invoked on our poor, pretty little
+flowers, and they fall.'"
+
+"And you, Beatrice," he asked, when she had ceased to speak, and there
+had been a silence afterwards, "how say you?"
+
+"Until within these few weeks I was afraid of you, and I believed that
+you would never, never forgive."
+
+"Until within these few weeks," he repeated.  "Have you changed your
+opinion of me within these few weeks?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"For what reason?"
+
+"I was getting some pieces of music in a shop in this town, when, to my
+terror, you came in.  As I veiled my face and stood in the dark end of
+the shop, I heard you explain that you wanted a musical instrument for a
+bedridden girl.  Your voice and manner were so softened, you showed such
+interest in its selection, you took it away yourself with so much
+tenderness of care and pleasure, that I knew you were a man with a most
+gentle heart.  Oh, Mr. Jackson, Mr. Jackson, if you could have felt the
+refreshing rain of tears that followed for me!"
+
+Was Phoebe playing at that moment on her distant couch?  He seemed to
+hear her.
+
+"I inquired in the shop where you lived, but could get no information.  As
+I had heard you say that you were going back by the next train (but you
+did not say where), I resolved to visit the station at about that time of
+day, as often as I could, between my lessons, on the chance of seeing you
+again.  I have been there very often, but saw you no more until to-day.
+You were meditating as you walked the street, but the calm expression of
+your face emboldened me to send my child to you.  And when I saw you bend
+your head to speak tenderly to her, I prayed to GOD to forgive me for
+having ever brought a sorrow on it.  I now pray to you to forgive me, and
+to forgive my husband.  I was very young, he was young too, and, in the
+ignorant hardihood of such a time of life, we don't know what we do to
+those who have undergone more discipline.  You generous man!  You good
+man!  So to raise me up and make nothing of my crime against you!"--for
+he would not see her on her knees, and soothed her as a kind father might
+have soothed an erring daughter--"thank you, bless you, thank you!"
+
+When he next spoke, it was after having drawn aside the window curtain
+and looked out awhile.  Then he only said:
+
+"Is Polly asleep?"
+
+"Yes.  As I came in, I met her going away upstairs, and put her to bed
+myself."
+
+"Leave her with me for to-morrow, Beatrice, and write me your address on
+this leaf of my pocket-book.  In the evening I will bring her home to
+you--and to her father."
+
+* * *
+
+"Hallo!" cried Polly, putting her saucy sunny face in at the door next
+morning when breakfast was ready: "I thought I was fetched last night?"
+
+"So you were, Polly, but I asked leave to keep you here for the day, and
+to take you home in the evening."
+
+"Upon my word!" said Polly.  "You are very cool, ain't you?"
+
+However, Polly seemed to think it a good idea, and added: "I suppose I
+must give you a kiss, though you _are_ cool."
+
+The kiss given and taken, they sat down to breakfast in a highly
+conversational tone.
+
+"Of course, you are going to amuse me?" said Polly.
+
+"Oh, of course!" said Barbox Brothers.
+
+In the pleasurable height of her anticipations, Polly found it
+indispensable to put down her piece of toast, cross one of her little fat
+knees over the other, and bring her little fat right hand down into her
+left hand with a business-like slap.  After this gathering of herself
+together, Polly, by that time a mere heap of dimples, asked in a
+wheedling manner:
+
+"What are we going to do, you dear old thing?"
+
+"Why, I was thinking," said Barbox Brothers, "--but are you fond of
+horses, Polly?"
+
+"Ponies, I am," said Polly, "especially when their tails are long.  But
+horses--n-no--too big, you know."
+
+"Well," pursued Barbox Brothers, in a spirit of grave mysterious
+confidence adapted to the importance of the consultation, "I did see
+yesterday, Polly, on the walls, pictures of two long-tailed ponies,
+speckled all over--"
+
+"No, no, NO!" cried Polly, in an ecstatic desire to linger on the
+charming details.  "Not speckled all over!"
+
+"Speckled all over.  Which ponies jump through hoops--"
+
+"No, no, NO!" cried Polly as before.  "They never jump through hoops!"
+
+"Yes, they do.  Oh, I assure you they do!  And eat pie in pinafores--"
+
+"Ponies eating pie in pinafores!" said Polly.  "What a story-teller you
+are, ain't you?"
+
+"Upon my honour.--And fire off guns."
+
+(Polly hardly seemed to see the force of the ponies resorting to fire-
+arms.)
+
+"And I was thinking," pursued the exemplary Barbox, "that if you and I
+were to go to the Circus where these ponies are, it would do our
+constitutions good."
+
+"Does that mean amuse us?" inquired Polly.  "What long words you do use,
+don't you?"
+
+Apologetic for having wandered out of his depth, he replied:
+
+"That means amuse us.  That is exactly what it means.  There are many
+other wonders besides the ponies, and we shall see them all.  Ladies and
+gentlemen in spangled dresses, and elephants and lions and tigers."
+
+Polly became observant of the teapot, with a curled-up nose indicating
+some uneasiness of mind.
+
+"They never get out, of course," she remarked as a mere truism.
+
+"The elephants and lions and tigers?  Oh, dear no!"
+
+"Oh, dear no!" said Polly.  "And of course nobody's afraid of the ponies
+shooting anybody."
+
+"Not the least in the world."
+
+"No, no, not the least in the world," said Polly.
+
+"I was also thinking," proceeded Barbox, "that if we were to look in at
+the toy-shop, to choose a doll--"
+
+"Not dressed!" cried Polly with a clap of her hands.  "No, no, NO, not
+dressed!"
+
+"Full-dressed.  Together with a house, and all things necessary for
+housekeeping--"
+
+Polly gave a little scream, and seemed in danger of falling into a swoon
+of bliss.
+
+"What a darling you are!" she languidly exclaimed, leaning back in her
+chair.  "Come and be hugged, or I must come and hug you."
+
+This resplendent programme was carried into execution with the utmost
+rigour of the law.  It being essential to make the purchase of the doll
+its first feature--or that lady would have lost the ponies--the toy-shop
+expedition took precedence.  Polly in the magic warehouse, with a doll as
+large as herself under each arm, and a neat assortment of some twenty
+more on view upon the counter, did indeed present a spectacle of
+indecision not quite compatible with unalloyed happiness, but the light
+cloud passed.  The lovely specimen oftenest chosen, oftenest rejected,
+and finally abided by, was of Circassian descent, possessing as much
+boldness of beauty as was reconcilable with extreme feebleness of mouth,
+and combining a sky-blue silk pelisse with rose-coloured satin trousers,
+and a black velvet hat: which this fair stranger to our northern shores
+would seem to have founded on the portraits of the late Duchess of Kent.
+The name this distinguished foreigner brought with her from beneath the
+glowing skies of a sunny clime was (on Polly's authority) Miss Melluka,
+and the costly nature of her outfit as a housekeeper, from the Barbox
+coffers, may be inferred from the two facts that her silver tea-spoons
+were as large as her kitchen poker, and that the proportions of her watch
+exceeded those of her frying-pan.  Miss Melluka was graciously pleased to
+express her entire approbation of the Circus, and so was Polly; for the
+ponies were speckled, and brought down nobody when they fired, and the
+savagery of the wild beasts appeared to be mere smoke--which article, in
+fact, they did produce in large quantities from their insides.  The
+Barbox absorption in the general subject throughout the realisation of
+these delights was again a sight to see, nor was it less worthy to behold
+at dinner, when he drank to Miss Melluka, tied stiff in a chair opposite
+to Polly (the fair Circassian possessing an unbendable spine), and even
+induced the waiter to assist in carrying out with due decorum the
+prevailing glorious idea.  To wind up, there came the agreeable fever of
+getting Miss Melluka and all her wardrobe and rich possessions into a fly
+with Polly, to be taken home.  But, by that time, Polly had become unable
+to look upon such accumulated joys with waking eyes, and had withdrawn
+her consciousness into the wonderful Paradise of a child's sleep.  "Sleep,
+Polly, sleep," said Barbox Brothers, as her head dropped on his shoulder;
+"you shall not fall out of this bed easily, at any rate!"
+
+What rustling piece of paper he took from his pocket, and carefully
+folded into the bosom of Polly's frock, shall not be mentioned.  He said
+nothing about it, and nothing shall be said about it.  They drove to a
+modest suburb of the great ingenious town, and stopped at the fore-court
+of a small house.  "Do not wake the child," said Barbox Brothers softly
+to the driver; "I will carry her in as she is."
+
+Greeting the light at the opened door which was held by Polly's mother,
+Polly's bearer passed on with mother and child in to a ground-floor room.
+There, stretched on a sofa, lay a sick man, sorely wasted, who covered
+his eyes with his emaciated hand.
+
+"Tresham," said Barbox in a kindly voice, "I have brought you back your
+Polly, fast asleep.  Give me your hand, and tell me you are better."
+
+The sick man reached forth his right hand, and bowed his head over the
+hand into which it was taken, and kissed it.  "Thank you, thank you!  I
+may say that I am well and happy."
+
+"That's brave," said Barbox.  "Tresham, I have a fancy--Can you make room
+for me beside you here?"
+
+He sat down on the sofa as he said the words, cherishing the plump
+peachey cheek that lay uppermost on his shoulder.
+
+"I have a fancy, Tresham (I am getting quite an old fellow now, you know,
+and old fellows may take fancies into their heads sometimes), to give up
+Polly, having found her, to no one but you.  Will you take her from me?"
+
+As the father held out his arms for the child, each of the two men looked
+steadily at the other.
+
+"She is very dear to you, Tresham?"
+
+"Unutterably dear."
+
+"God bless her!  It is not much, Polly," he continued, turning his eyes
+upon her peaceful face as he apostrophized her, "it is not much, Polly,
+for a blind and sinful man to invoke a blessing on something so far
+better than himself as a little child is; but it would be much--much upon
+his cruel head, and much upon his guilty soul--if he could be so wicked
+as to invoke a curse.  He had better have a millstone round his neck, and
+be cast into the deepest sea.  Live and thrive, my pretty baby!"  Here he
+kissed her.  "Live and prosper, and become in time the mother of other
+little children, like the Angels who behold The Father's face!"
+
+He kissed her again, gave her up gently to both her parents, and went
+out.
+
+But he went not to Wales.  No, he never went to Wales.  He went
+straightway for another stroll about the town, and he looked in upon the
+people at their work, and at their play, here, there, every-there, and
+where not.  For he was Barbox Brothers and Co. now, and had taken
+thousands of partners into the solitary firm.
+
+He had at length got back to his hotel room, and was standing before his
+fire refreshing himself with a glass of hot drink which he had stood upon
+the chimney-piece, when he heard the town clocks striking, and, referring
+to his watch, found the evening to have so slipped away, that they were
+striking twelve.  As he put up his watch again, his eyes met those of his
+reflection in the chimney-glass.
+
+"Why, it's your birthday already," he said, smiling.  "You are looking
+very well.  I wish you many happy returns of the day."
+
+He had never before bestowed that wish upon himself.  "By Jupiter!" he
+discovered, "it alters the whole case of running away from one's
+birthday!  It's a thing to explain to Phoebe.  Besides, here is quite a
+long story to tell her, that has sprung out of the road with no story.
+I'll go back, instead of going on.  I'll go back by my friend Lamps's Up
+X presently."
+
+He went back to Mugby Junction, and, in point of fact, he established
+himself at Mugby Junction.  It was the convenient place to live in, for
+brightening Phoebe's life.  It was the convenient place to live in, for
+having her taught music by Beatrice.  It was the convenient place to live
+in, for occasionally borrowing Polly.  It was the convenient place to
+live in, for being joined at will to all sorts of agreeable places and
+persons.  So, he became settled there, and, his house standing in an
+elevated situation, it is noteworthy of him in conclusion, as Polly
+herself might (not irreverently) have put it:
+
+   "There was an Old Barbox who lived on a hill,
+   And if he ain't gone, he lives there still."
+
+Here follows the substance of what was seen, heard, or otherwise picked
+up, by the gentleman for Nowhere, in his careful study of the Junction.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE BOY AT MUGBY
+
+
+I am the boy at Mugby.  That's about what _I_ am.
+
+You don't know what I mean?  What a pity!  But I think you do.  I think
+you must.  Look here.  I am the boy at what is called The Refreshment
+Room at Mugby Junction, and what's proudest boast is, that it never yet
+refreshed a mortal being.
+
+Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, in the
+height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I've often counted 'em while they
+brush the First-Class hair twenty-seven ways), behind the bottles, among
+the glasses, bounded on the nor'west by the beer, stood pretty far to the
+right of a metallic object that's at times the tea-urn and at times the
+soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its
+contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by
+a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly
+exposed sideways to the glare of Our Missis's eye--you ask a Boy so
+sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink;
+you take particular notice that he'll try to seem not to hear you, that
+he'll appear in a absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent
+medium composed of your head and body, and that he won't serve you as
+long as you can possibly bear it.  That's me.
+
+What a lark it is!  We are the Model Establishment, we are, at Mugby.
+Other Refreshment Rooms send their imperfect young ladies up to be
+finished off by our Missis.  For some of the young ladies, when they're
+new to the business, come into it mild!  Ah!  Our Missis, she soon takes
+that out of 'em.  Why, I originally come into the business meek myself.
+But Our Missis, she soon took that out of _me_.
+
+What a delightful lark it is!  I look upon us Refreshmenters as ockipying
+the only proudly independent footing on the Line.  There's Papers, for
+instance,--my honourable friend, if he will allow me to call him so,--him
+as belongs to Smith's bookstall.  Why, he no more dares to be up to our
+Refreshmenting games than he dares to jump a top of a locomotive with her
+steam at full pressure, and cut away upon her alone, driving himself, at
+limited-mail speed.  Papers, he'd get his head punched at every
+compartment, first, second, and third, the whole length of a train, if he
+was to ventur to imitate my demeanour.  It's the same with the porters,
+the same with the guards, the same with the ticket clerks, the same the
+whole way up to the secretary, traffic-manager, or very chairman.  There
+ain't a one among 'em on the nobly independent footing we are.  Did you
+ever catch one of them, when you wanted anything of him, making a system
+of surveying the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head
+and body?  I should hope not.
+
+You should see our Bandolining Room at Mugby Junction.  It's led to by
+the door behind the counter, which you'll notice usually stands ajar, and
+it's the room where Our Missis and our young ladies Bandolines their
+hair.  You should see 'em at it, betwixt trains, Bandolining away, as if
+they was anointing themselves for the combat.  When you're telegraphed,
+you should see their noses all a-going up with scorn, as if it was a part
+of the working of the same Cooke and Wheatstone electrical machinery.  You
+should hear Our Missis give the word, "Here comes the Beast to be Fed!"
+and then you should see 'em indignantly skipping across the Line, from
+the Up to the Down, or Wicer Warsaw, and begin to pitch the stale pastry
+into the plates, and chuck the sawdust sangwiches under the glass covers,
+and get out the--ha, ha, ha!--the sherry,--O my eye, my eye!--for your
+Refreshment.
+
+It's only in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which, of
+course, I mean to say Britannia) that Refreshmenting is so effective, so
+'olesome, so constitutional a check upon the public.  There was a
+Foreigner, which having politely, with his hat off, beseeched our young
+ladies and Our Missis for "a leetel gloss host prarndee," and having had
+the Line surveyed through him by all and no other acknowledgment, was a-
+proceeding at last to help himself, as seems to be the custom in his own
+country, when Our Missis, with her hair almost a-coming un-Bandolined
+with rage, and her eyes omitting sparks, flew at him, cotched the
+decanter out of his hand, and said, "Put it down!  I won't allow that!"
+The foreigner turned pale, stepped back with his arms stretched out in
+front of him, his hands clasped, and his shoulders riz, and exclaimed:
+"Ah!  Is it possible, this!  That these disdaineous females and this
+ferocious old woman are placed here by the administration, not only to
+empoison the voyagers, but to affront them!  Great Heaven!  How arrives
+it?  The English people.  Or is he then a slave?  Or idiot?"  Another
+time, a merry, wideawake American gent had tried the sawdust and spit it
+out, and had tried the Sherry and spit that out, and had tried in vain to
+sustain exhausted natur upon Butter-Scotch, and had been rather extra
+Bandolined and Line-surveyed through, when, as the bell was ringing and
+he paid Our Missis, he says, very loud and good-tempered: "I tell Yew
+what 'tis, ma'arm.  I la'af.  Theer!  I la'af.  I Dew.  I oughter ha'
+seen most things, for I hail from the Onlimited side of the Atlantic
+Ocean, and I haive travelled right slick over the Limited, head on
+through Jeerusalemm and the East, and likeways France and Italy, Europe
+Old World, and am now upon the track to the Chief Europian Village; but
+such an Institution as Yew, and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin's
+solid and liquid, afore the glorious Tarnal I never did see yet!  And if
+I hain't found the eighth wonder of monarchical Creation, in finding Yew
+and Yewer young ladies, and Yewer fixin's solid and liquid, all as
+aforesaid, established in a country where the people air not absolute Loo-
+naticks, I am Extra Double Darned with a Nip and Frizzle to the
+innermostest grit!  Wheerfur--Theer!--I la'af!  I Dew, ma'arm.  I la'af!"
+And so he went, stamping and shaking his sides, along the platform all
+the way to his own compartment.
+
+I think it was her standing up agin the Foreigner as giv' Our Missis the
+idea of going over to France, and droring a comparison betwixt
+Refreshmenting as followed among the frog-eaters, and Refreshmenting as
+triumphant in the Isle of the Brave and Land of the Free (by which, of
+course, I mean to say agin, Britannia).  Our young ladies, Miss Whiff,
+Miss Piff, and Mrs. Sniff, was unanimous opposed to her going; for, as
+they says to Our Missis one and all, it is well beknown to the hends of
+the herth as no other nation except Britain has a idea of anythink, but
+above all of business.  Why then should you tire yourself to prove what
+is already proved?  Our Missis, however (being a teazer at all pints)
+stood out grim obstinate, and got a return pass by Southeastern Tidal, to
+go right through, if such should be her dispositions, to Marseilles.
+
+Sniff is husband to Mrs. Sniff, and is a regular insignificant cove.  He
+looks arter the sawdust department in a back room, and is sometimes, when
+we are very hard put to it, let behind the counter with a corkscrew; but
+never when it can be helped, his demeanour towards the public being
+disgusting servile.  How Mrs. Sniff ever come so far to lower herself as
+to marry him, I don't know; but I suppose he does, and I should think he
+wished he didn't, for he leads a awful life.  Mrs. Sniff couldn't be much
+harder with him if he was public.  Similarly, Miss Whiff and Miss Piff,
+taking the tone of Mrs. Sniff, they shoulder Sniff about when he _is_ let
+in with a corkscrew, and they whisk things out of his hands when in his
+servility he is a-going to let the public have 'em, and they snap him up
+when in the crawling baseness of his spirit he is a-going to answer a
+public question, and they drore more tears into his eyes than ever the
+mustard does which he all day long lays on to the sawdust.  (But it ain't
+strong.)  Once, when Sniff had the repulsiveness to reach across to get
+the milk-pot to hand over for a baby, I see Our Missis in her rage catch
+him by both his shoulders, and spin him out into the Bandolining Room.
+
+But Mrs. Sniff,--how different!  She's the one!  She's the one as you'll
+notice to be always looking another way from you, when you look at her.
+She's the one with the small waist buckled in tight in front, and with
+the lace cuffs at her wrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter
+before her, and stands a smoothing while the public foams.  This
+smoothing the cuffs and looking another way while the public foams is the
+last accomplishment taught to the young ladies as come to Mugby to be
+finished by Our Missis; and it's always taught by Mrs. Sniff.
+
+When Our Missis went away upon her journey, Mrs. Sniff was left in
+charge.  She did hold the public in check most beautiful!  In all my
+time, I never see half so many cups of tea given without milk to people
+as wanted it with, nor half so many cups of tea with milk given to people
+as wanted it without.  When foaming ensued, Mrs. Sniff would say: "Then
+you'd better settle it among yourselves, and change with one another."  It
+was a most highly delicious lark.  I enjoyed the Refreshmenting business
+more than ever, and was so glad I had took to it when young.
+
+Our Missis returned.  It got circulated among the young ladies, and it as
+it might be penetrated to me through the crevices of the Bandolining
+Room, that she had Orrors to reveal, if revelations so contemptible could
+be dignified with the name.  Agitation become awakened.  Excitement was
+up in the stirrups.  Expectation stood a-tiptoe.  At length it was put
+forth that on our slacked evening in the week, and at our slackest time
+of that evening betwixt trains, Our Missis would give her views of
+foreign Refreshmenting, in the Bandolining Room.
+
+It was arranged tasteful for the purpose.  The Bandolining table and
+glass was hid in a corner, a arm-chair was elevated on a packing-case for
+Our Missis's ockypation, a table and a tumbler of water (no sherry in it,
+thankee) was placed beside it.  Two of the pupils, the season being
+autumn, and hollyhocks and dahlias being in, ornamented the wall with
+three devices in those flowers.  On one might be read, "MAY ALBION NEVER
+LEARN;" on another "KEEP THE PUBLIC DOWN;" on another, "OUR
+REFRESHMENTING CHARTER."  The whole had a beautiful appearance, with
+which the beauty of the sentiments corresponded.
+
+On Our Missis's brow was wrote Severity, as she ascended the fatal
+platform.  (Not that that was anythink new.)  Miss Whiff and Miss Piff
+sat at her feet.  Three chairs from the Waiting Room might have been
+perceived by a average eye, in front of her, on which the pupils was
+accommodated.  Behind them a very close observer might have discerned a
+Boy.  Myself.
+
+"Where," said Our Missis, glancing gloomily around, "is Sniff?"
+
+"I thought it better," answered Mrs. Sniff, "that he should not be let to
+come in.  He is such an Ass."
+
+"No doubt," assented Our Missis.  "But for that reason is it not
+desirable to improve his mind?"
+
+"Oh, nothing will ever improve _him_," said Mrs. Sniff.
+
+"However," pursued Our Missis, "call him in, Ezekiel."
+
+I called him in.  The appearance of the low-minded cove was hailed with
+disapprobation from all sides, on account of his having brought his
+corkscrew with him.  He pleaded "the force of habit."
+
+"The force!" said Mrs. Sniff.  "Don't let us have you talking about
+force, for Gracious' sake.  There!  Do stand still where you are, with
+your back against the wall."
+
+He is a smiling piece of vacancy, and he smiled in the mean way in which
+he will even smile at the public if he gets a chance (language can say no
+meaner of him), and he stood upright near the door with the back of his
+head agin the wall, as if he was a waiting for somebody to come and
+measure his heighth for the Army.
+
+"I should not enter, ladies," says Our Missis, "on the revolting
+disclosures I am about to make, if it was not in the hope that they will
+cause you to be yet more implacable in the exercise of the power you
+wield in a constitutional country, and yet more devoted to the
+constitutional motto which I see before me,"--it was behind her, but the
+words sounded better so,--"'May Albion never learn!'"
+
+Here the pupils as had made the motto admired it, and cried, "Hear!  Hear!
+Hear!"  Sniff, showing an inclination to join in chorus, got himself
+frowned down by every brow.
+
+"The baseness of the French," pursued Our Missis, "as displayed in the
+fawning nature of their Refreshmenting, equals, if not surpasses,
+anythink as was ever heard of the baseness of the celebrated Bonaparte."
+
+Miss Whiff, Miss Piff, and me, we drored a heavy breath, equal to saying,
+"We thought as much!"  Miss Whiff and Miss Piff seeming to object to my
+droring mine along with theirs, I drored another to aggravate 'em.
+
+"Shall I be believed," says Our Missis, with flashing eyes, "when I tell
+you that no sooner had I set my foot upon that treacherous shore--"
+
+Here Sniff, either bursting out mad, or thinking aloud, says, in a low
+voice: "Feet.  Plural, you know."
+
+The cowering that come upon him when he was spurned by all eyes, added to
+his being beneath contempt, was sufficient punishment for a cove so
+grovelling.  In the midst of a silence rendered more impressive by the
+turned-up female noses with which it was pervaded, Our Missis went on:
+
+"Shall I be believed when I tell you, that no sooner had I landed," this
+word with a killing look at Sniff, "on that treacherous shore, than I was
+ushered into a Refreshment Room where there were--I do not
+exaggerate--actually eatable things to eat?"
+
+A groan burst from the ladies.  I not only did myself the honour of
+jining, but also of lengthening it out.
+
+"Where there were," Our Missis added, "not only eatable things to eat,
+but also drinkable things to drink?"
+
+A murmur, swelling almost into a scream, ariz.  Miss Piff, trembling with
+indignation, called out, "Name?"
+
+"I _will_ name," said Our Missis.  "There was roast fowls, hot and cold;
+there was smoking roast veal surrounded with browned potatoes; there was
+hot soup with (again I ask shall I be credited?) nothing bitter in it,
+and no flour to choke off the consumer; there was a variety of cold
+dishes set off with jelly; there was salad; there was--mark me! _fresh_
+pastry, and that of a light construction; there was a luscious show of
+fruit; there was bottles and decanters of sound small wine, of every
+size, and adapted to every pocket; the same odious statement will apply
+to brandy; and these were set out upon the counter so that all could help
+themselves."
+
+Our Missis's lips so quivered, that Mrs. Sniff, though scarcely less
+convulsed than she were, got up and held the tumbler to them.
+
+"This," proceeds Our Missis, "was my first unconstitutional experience.
+Well would it have been if it had been my last and worst.  But no.  As I
+proceeded farther into that enslaved and ignorant land, its aspect became
+more hideous.  I need not explain to this assembly the ingredients and
+formation of the British Refreshment sangwich?"
+
+Universal laughter,--except from Sniff, who, as sangwich-cutter, shook
+his head in a state of the utmost dejection as he stood with it agin the
+wall.
+
+"Well!" said Our Missis, with dilated nostrils.  "Take a fresh, crisp,
+long, crusty penny loaf made of the whitest and best flour.  Cut it
+longwise through the middle.  Insert a fair and nicely fitting slice of
+ham.  Tie a smart piece of ribbon round the middle of the whole to bind
+it together.  Add at one end a neat wrapper of clean white paper by which
+to hold it.  And the universal French Refreshment sangwich busts on your
+disgusted vision."
+
+A cry of "Shame!" from all--except Sniff, which rubbed his stomach with a
+soothing hand.
+
+"I need not," said Our Missis, "explain to this assembly the usual
+formation and fitting of the British Refreshment Room?"
+
+No, no, and laughter.  Sniff agin shaking his head in low spirits agin
+the wall.
+
+"Well," said Our Missis, "what would you say to a general decoration of
+everythink, to hangings (sometimes elegant), to easy velvet furniture, to
+abundance of little tables, to abundance of little seats, to brisk bright
+waiters, to great convenience, to a pervading cleanliness and
+tastefulness positively addressing the public, and making the Beast
+thinking itself worth the pains?"
+
+Contemptuous fury on the part of all the ladies.  Mrs. Sniff looking as
+if she wanted somebody to hold her, and everbody else looking as if
+they'd rayther not.
+
+"Three times," said Our Missis, working herself into a truly
+terrimenjious state,--"three times did I see these shameful things, only
+between the coast and Paris, and not counting either: at Hazebroucke, at
+Arras, at Amiens.  But worse remains.  Tell me, what would you call a
+person who should propose in England that there should be kept, say at
+our own model Mugby Junction, pretty baskets, each holding an assorted
+cold lunch and dessert for one, each at a certain fixed price, and each
+within a passenger's power to take away, to empty in the carriage at
+perfect leisure, and to return at another station fifty or a hundred
+miles farther on?"
+
+There was disagreement what such a person should be called.  Whether
+revolutionise, atheist, Bright (_I_ said him), or Un-English.  Miss Piff
+screeched her shrill opinion last, in the words: "A malignant maniac!"
+
+"I adopt," says Our Missis, "the brand set upon such a person by the
+righteous indignation of my friend Miss Piff.  A malignant maniac.  Know,
+then, that that malignant maniac has sprung from the congenial soil of
+France, and that his malignant madness was in unchecked action on this
+same part of my journey."
+
+I noticed that Sniff was a-rubbing his hands, and that Mrs. Sniff had got
+her eye upon him.  But I did not take more particular notice, owing to
+the excited state in which the young ladies was, and to feeling myself
+called upon to keep it up with a howl.
+
+"On my experience south of Paris," said Our Missis, in a deep tone, "I
+will not expatiate.  Too loathsome were the task!  But fancy this.  Fancy
+a guard coming round, with the train at full speed, to inquire how many
+for dinner.  Fancy his telegraphing forward the number of dinners.  Fancy
+every one expected, and the table elegantly laid for the complete party.
+Fancy a charming dinner, in a charming room, and the head-cook, concerned
+for the honour of every dish, superintending in his clean white jacket
+and cap.  Fancy the Beast travelling six hundred miles on end, very fast,
+and with great punctuality, yet being taught to expect all this to be
+done for it!"
+
+A spirited chorus of "The Beast!"
+
+I noticed that Sniff was agin a-rubbing his stomach with a soothing hand,
+and that he had drored up one leg.  But agin I didn't take particular
+notice, looking on myself as called upon to stimulate public feeling.  It
+being a lark besides.
+
+"Putting everything together," said Our Missis, "French Refreshmenting
+comes to this, and oh, it comes to a nice total!  First: eatable things
+to eat, and drinkable things to drink."
+
+A groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me.
+
+"Second: convenience, and even elegance."
+
+Another groan from the young ladies, kep' up by me.
+
+"Third: moderate charges."
+
+This time a groan from me, kep' up by the young ladies.
+
+"Fourth:--and here," says Our Missis, "I claim your angriest
+sympathy,--attention, common civility, nay, even politeness!"
+
+Me and the young ladies regularly raging mad all together.
+
+"And I cannot in conclusion," says Our Missis, with her spitefullest
+sneer, "give you a completer pictur of that despicable nation (after what
+I have related), than assuring you that they wouldn't bear our
+constitutional ways and noble independence at Mugby Junction, for a
+single month, and that they would turn us to the right-about and put
+another system in our places, as soon as look at us; perhaps sooner, for
+I do not believe they have the good taste to care to look at us twice."
+
+The swelling tumult was arrested in its rise.  Sniff, bore away by his
+servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher
+relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his head.
+It was at this moment that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep' her eye upon him like
+the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim.  Our Missis followed them
+both out, and cries was heard in the sawdust department.
+
+You come into the Down Refreshment Room, at the Junction, making believe
+you don't know me, and I'll pint you out with my right thumb over my
+shoulder which is Our Missis, and which is Miss Whiff, and which is Miss
+Piff, and which is Mrs. Sniff.  But you won't get a chance to see Sniff,
+because he disappeared that night.  Whether he perished, tore to pieces,
+I cannot say; but his corkscrew alone remains, to bear witness to the
+servility of his disposition.
+
+
+
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