When there was no market, or when I wanted variety, a railway terminus
with the morning mails coming in, was remunerative company. But like
most of the company to be had in this world, it lasted only a very
short time. The station lamps would burst out ablaze, the porters
would emerge from places of concealment, the cabs and trucks would
rattle to their places (the post-office carts were already in theirs),
and, finally, the bell would strike up, and the train would come
banging in. But there were few passengers and little luggage, and
everything scuttled away with the greatest expedition. The locomotive
post-offices, with their great nets--as if they had been dragging the
country for bodies--would fly open as to their doors, and would
disgorge a smell of lamp, an exhausted clerk, a guard in a red coat,
and their bags of letters; the engine would blow and heave and
perspire, like an engine wiping its forehead and saying what a run it
had had; and within ten minutes the lamps were out, and I was
houseless and alone again.

But now, there were driven cattle on the high road near, wanting (as
cattle always do) to turn into the midst of stone walls, and squeeze
themselves through six inches' width of iron railing, and getting
their heads down (also as cattle always do) for tossing-purchase at
quite imaginary dogs, and giving themselves and every devoted creature
associated with them a most extraordinary amount of unnecessary
trouble. Now, too, the conscious gas began to grow pale with the
knowledge that daylight was coming, and straggling work-people were
already in the streets, and, as waking life had become extinguished
with the last pieman's sparks, so it began to be rekindled with the
fires of the first street-corner breakfast-sellers. And so by faster
and faster degrees, until the last degrees were very fast, the day
came, and I was tired and could sleep. And it is not, as I used to
think, going home at such times, the least wonderful thing in London,
that in the real desert region of the night, the houseless wanderer is
alone there. I knew well enough where to find Vice and Misfortune of
all kinds, if I had chosen; but they were put out of sight, and my
houselessness had many miles upon miles of streets in which it could,
and did, have its own solitary way.

_Dickens._

"A PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED"

These words will be familiar to all students of Skelt's Juvenile
Drama. That national monumen