Mugby Junction | Page 4

fires were being raked clear; concurrently,
shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of
their suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts
with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at least they have long
icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their lips. Unknown languages in the air,
conspiring in red, green, and white characters. An earthquake, accompanied with thunder
and lightning, going up express to London. Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in
possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn
over its head, like Caesar.
Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in
the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep
cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing
upon him, and passing away into obscurity. Here mournfully went by a child who had
never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of
his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best years had been
distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman
once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark
meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the
discords of a solitary and unhappy existence.
"--Yours, sir?"
The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been staring, and fell
back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the
question.
"Oh! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two portmanteaus are
mine. Are you a Porter?"
"On Porter's wages, sir. But I am Lamps."
The traveller looked a little confused.
"Who did you say you are?"
"Lamps, sir," showing an oily cloth in his hand, as farther explanation.

"Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?"
"Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but--" Lamps, with a mighty
serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly added--"but it's a blessed
circumstance for you that it's not open."
"You couldn't recommend it, I see, if it was available?"
"Ask your pardon, sir. If it was -?"
"Open?"
"It ain't my place, as a paid servant of the company, to give my opinion on any of the
company's toepics,"--he pronounced it more like toothpicks,--"beyond lamp-ile and
cottons," returned Lamps in a confidential tone; "but, speaking as a man, I wouldn't
recommend my father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he'd be treated
at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would NOT."
The traveller nodded conviction. "I suppose I can put up in the town? There is a town
here?" For the traveller (though a stay-at- home compared with most travellers) had been,
like many others, carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through that Junction
before, without having ever, as one might say, gone ashore there.
"Oh yes, there's a town, sir! Anyways, there's town enough to put up in. But," following
the glance of the other at his luggage, "this is a very dead time of the night with us, sir.
The deadest time. I might a'most call it our deadest and buriedest time."
"No porters about?"
"Well, sir, you see," returned Lamps, confidential again, "they in general goes off with
the gas. That's how it is. And they seem to have overlooked you, through your walking to
the furder end of the platform. But, in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up."
"Who may be up?"
"The three forty-two, sir. She goes off in a sidin' till the Up X passes, and then she"--here
an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded Lamps--"does all as lays in her power."
"I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement."
"I doubt if anybody do, sir. She's a Parliamentary, sir. And, you see, a Parliamentary, or a
Skirmishun--"
"Do you mean an Excursion?"
"That's it, sir.--A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun, she mostly DOES go off into a sidin'.
But, when she CAN get a chance, she's whistled out of it, and she's whistled up into doin'
all as,"--Lamps again wore the air of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best,- -"all
as lays in her power."
He then explained that the porters on duty, being required to be in attendance on the
Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless turn up with the gas. In the meantime,
if the gentleman would not very much object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept
the warmth of his little room