ted presents within the same compass so
many difficulties to the audience who are listening, and to the
Reader who is hardy enough to adventure upon its delivery. The closing
incidents of the narrative are in themselves so improbable, we had all
but said so impossible! Polly, at once so quaint and so captivating,
when her words are perused upon the printed page, is so incapable of
having her baby-prattle repeated by anybody else, without the imminent
risk, the all but certainty, of its degenerating into mere childishness.
It can scarcely be wondered, therefore, that "Barbox Brothers," though
it actually was Read, and Read successfully, was hardly ever repeated.
Everybody who has once looked into the story will bear in mind how,
quite abruptly, almost haphazard, it comes to be narrated.

The lumbering, middle-aged, grey-headed hero of it, in obedience to
the whim of a moment, gets out of a night train at the great central
junction of the whole railway system of England. A drenching rain-storm
and a windy platform, darkness and solitude are, to begin with, the
agreeable surroundings of this eccentric traveller. He is stranded
there, not high and dry, anything but that--on the contrary, soaked
through and through, and at very low level indeed--during what the local
officials regard as their deadest time in all the twenty-four hours:
what one of them, later on, terms emphatically their deadest and
buriedest time.

Already, even here, before the tale itself is in any way begun, the
Author of it, in his capacity as Reader, somehow, by the mere manner of
his delivery of a descriptive sentence or two, contrived to realise
to his hearers in a wonderfully vivid way the strange incidents of
the traffic in a scene like this, at those blackest intervals between
midnight and daybreak. Now revealing--"Mysterious goods trains,
covered with palls, and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying
themselves guiltily away, as if their freight had come to a secret and
unlawful end." Now, again--"Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective
manner, following when they led, stopping when they stopped, backing
when they backed." One while the spectacle, conjured up by a word or two
was that of--"Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green,
and white characters." Another, with startling effect, it was--"An
earthquake, with thunder and lightning, going up express to London."
Here it is that Barbox Brothers, in the midst of these gho