fficult 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.

"O! My thoug