n 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, blots of smoke, valleys of canal, and
hills of 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 byways. 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 May-flies 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