and mouths too: at least they have long icicles
(or what seem so) hanging from 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, unsumrnoned
and unannounced, stealing upon him and
passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully
went by, a child who had. never hud 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.

"O! 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 further 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
gone ashore there.

"O 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, " doos 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 doos 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 porters on duty being
required to be in attendance on the Parliamentary
matron in question, would doubtless turn up
with the gas. In the mean time, it' 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 ami 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!"