Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices | Page 2

Why couldn't he get up,
and punch somebody's head!'
'Whose?' asked Thomas Idle.
'Anybody's. Everybody's would be better than nobody's! If I fell into
that state of mind about a girl, do you think I'd lay me doon and dee?
No, sir,' proceeded Goodchild, with a disparaging assumption of the
Scottish accent, 'I'd get me oop and peetch into somebody. Wouldn't
you?'
'I wouldn't have anything to do with her,' yawned Thomas Idle. 'Why
should I take the trouble?'
'It's no trouble, Tom, to fall in love,' said Goodchild, shaking his head.
'It's trouble enough to fall out of it, once you're in it,' retorted Tom. 'So
I keep out of it altogether. It would be better for you, if you did the
same.'
Mr. Goodchild, who is always in love with somebody, and not
unfrequently with several objects at once, made no reply. He heaved a
sigh of the kind which is termed by the lower orders 'a bellowser,' and
then, heaving Mr. Idle on his feet (who was not half so heavy as the
sigh), urged him northward.
These two had sent their personal baggage on by train: only retaining
each a knapsack. Idle now applied himself to constantly regretting the
train, to tracking it through the intricacies of Bradshaw's Guide, and

finding out where it is now--and where now-- and where now--and to
asking what was the use of walking, when you could ride at such a pace
as that. Was it to see the country? If that was the object, look at it out of
the carriage windows. There was a great deal more of it to be seen there
than here. Besides, who wanted to see the country? Nobody. And again,
whoever did walk? Nobody. Fellows set off to walk, but they never did
it. They came back and said they did, but they didn't. Then why should
he walk? He wouldn't walk. He swore it by this milestone!
It was the fifth from London, so far had they penetrated into the North.
Submitting to the powerful chain of argument, Goodchild proposed a
return to the Metropolis, and a falling back upon Euston Square
Terminus. Thomas assented with alacrity, and so they walked down
into the North by the next morning's express, and carried their
knapsacks in the luggage-van.
It was like all other expresses, as every express is and must be. It bore
through the harvest country a smell like a large washing- day, and a
sharp issue of steam as from a huge brazen tea-urn. The greatest power
in nature and art combined, it yet glided over dangerous heights in the
sight of people looking up from fields and roads, as smoothly and
unreally as a light miniature plaything. Now, the engine shrieked in
hysterics of such intensity, that it seemed desirable that the men who
had her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and bring her to;
now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and undemonstrative
energy so confusing that the train seemed to be flying back into leagues
of darkness. Here, were station after station, swallowed up by the
express without stopping; here, stations where it fired itself in like a
volley of cannon-balls, swooped away four country-people with
nosegays, and three men of business with portmanteaus, and fired itself
off again, bang, bang, bang! At long intervals were uncomfortable
refreshment-rooms, made more uncomfortable by the scorn of Beauty
towards Beast, the public (but to whom she never relented, as Beauty
did in the story, towards the other Beast), and where sensitive stomachs
were fed, with a contemptuous sharpness occasioning indigestion. Here,
again, were stations with nothing going but a bell, and wonderful
wooden razors set aloft on great posts, shaving the air. In these fields,

the horses, sheep, and cattle were well used to the thundering meteor,
and didn't mind; in those, they were all set scampering together, and a
herd of pigs scoured after them. The pastoral country darkened, became
coaly, became smoky, became infernal, got better, got worse, improved
again, grew rugged, turned romantic; was a wood, a stream, a chain of
hills, a gorge, a moor, a cathedral town, a fortified place, a waste. Now,
miserable black dwellings, a black canal, and sick black towers of
chimneys; now, a trim garden, where the flowers were bright and fair;
now, a wilderness of hideous altars all a- blaze; now, the water
meadows with their fairy rings; now, the mangy patch of unlet building
ground outside the stagnant town, with the larger ring where the Circus
was last week. The temperature changed, the dialect changed, the
people changed, faces got sharper, manner got shorter, eyes got
shrewder and harder; yet all so quickly, that the spruce guard in the
London uniform and silver lace, had not yet rumpled