e 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