ut twenty-three.
Regularly at intervals of five minutes the Five Towns Electric Traction
Company, Limited, sent one of their dreadful engines down the street,
apparently with the object of disintegrating all the real property in
the neighbourhood into its original bricks. At the seventeenth time Mr
Cowlishaw trembled to hear a renewal of the bump-bump-bump. It was the
oval-wheeled car, which had been to Longshaw and back. He recognized it
as an old friend. He wondered whether he must expect it to pass a third
time. However, it did not pass a third time. After several clocks in and
out of the hotel had more or less agreed on the fact that it was one
o'clock, there was a surcease of earthquakes. Mr Cowlishaw dared not
hope that earthquakes were over. He waited in strained attention during
quite half an hour, expectant of the next earthquake. But it did not
come. Earthquakes were, indeed, done with till the morrow.

It was about two o'clock when his nerves were sufficiently
tranquillized to enable him to envisage the possibility of going to
sleep. And he was just slipping, gliding, floating off when he was
brought back to realities by a terrific explosion of laughter at the
head of the stairs outside his bedroom door. The building rang like the
inside of a piano when you strike a wire directly. The explosion was
followed by low rumblings of laughter and then by a series of jolly,
hearty "Good-nights." He recognized the voices as being those of a
group of commercial travellers and two actors (of the Hanbridge Theatre
Royal's specially selected London Pantomime Company), who had been
pointed out to him with awe and joy by the aforesaid barmaid. They were
telling each other stories in the private bar, and apparently they had
been telling each other stories ever since. And the truth is that the
atmosphere of the Turk's Head, where commercial travellers and actors
forgather every night except perhaps Sundays, contains more good stories
to the cubic inch than any other resort in the county of Staffordshire.
A few seconds after the explosion there was a dropping fusillade--the
commercial travellers and the actors shutting their doors. And about
five minutes later there was another and more complicated dropping
fusillade--the commercial travellers and actors opening their doors,
depositing their boots (two to each soul), and shutting their doors.

Then silence.

And then out of the silence the terrified Mr Cowlishaw heard arisin