ne with what a sinking of
the heart I beheld, this morning, on a road near the coast of Norfolk, a
railway-car without wheels.

Without wheels though it was, it had motion--of a kind; of a kind worse
than actual stagnation. Mounted on a very long steam-lorry that
groaned and panted, it very slowly passed me. I noted that two of its
compartments were marked FIRST, the rest THIRD. And in some of them, I
noted, you might smoke. But of this opportunity you were not availing
yourself. All the compartments, the cheap and the dear alike, were
vacant. They were transporting air only--and this (I conceived)
abominable. The sun slanted fiercely down on the old iron roof, the old
wooden walls, the dingy shut windows. The fume and grime of a thousand
familiar tunnels, of year after year of journeys by night, journeys by
day, from time immemorial, seemed to have invested the whole structure
with a character that shrank from the sun's scrutiny and from the
nearness of sea and fields. Fuliginous, monstrous, slowly, shamefully,
the thing went by--to what final goal?--in the lovely weather.

There attended it, besides the driver of the lorry, a straggling retinue
of half-a-dozen men on foot--handy-looking mechanics, very dusty.
I should have liked to question one or another of these as to their
mission. But I was afraid to do so. There is an art of talking
acceptably to people who do not regard themselves as members of one's
own class; and I have never acquired it. I suppose the first step is to
forget that any art is needed-to forget that one must not be so wildly
cordial for fear of seeming to 'condescend,' nor be more than a trifle
saturnine, either, for the same motive. Or am I wrong? The whole thing
is a mystery to me. All I know is that if I had asked those mechanics
what they were doing with that railway car they would have seemed to
suspect me of meaning that it was my property and that they had
stolen it. Or perhaps they would have seemed merely to resent my idle
curiosity. If so, why not? When I walk abroad with a sheaf of manuscript
in my hand, mechanics do not stop me to ask 'What's that? What's it
about? Who's going to publish it?' Nor is this because, times having
changed so, they are afraid of seeming to condescend. They always did
mind their own business. And now that their own business is so much more
lucrative than mine they still follow that golden rule.

I stood gazing back at the procession till it disappeared rou