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.
