Mugby Junction | Page 5

- The gentleman, being by this time very cold, instantly
closed with the proposal.
A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive, to the sense of smell, of a cabin in a Whaler. But
there was a bright fire burning in its rusty grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden
stand of newly trimmed and lighted lamps, ready for carriage service. They made a bright
show, and their light, and the warmth, accounted for the popularity of the room, as borne
witness to by many impressions of velveteen trousers on a form by the fire, and many
rounded smears and smudges of stooping velveteen shoulders on the adjacent wall.
Various untidy shelves accommodated a quantity of lamps and oil- cans, and also a

fragrant collection of what looked like the pocket- handkerchiefs of the whole lamp
family.
As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of his luggage) took his seat
upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved hands at the fire, he glanced aside at a little
deal desk, much blotched with ink, which his elbow touched. Upon it were some scraps
of coarse paper, and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances.
From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily to his host, and said, with
some roughness:
"Why, you are never a poet, man?"
Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as he stood modestly
rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedingly oily, that he might have been
in the act of mistaking himself for one of his charges. He was a spare man of about the
Barbox Brothers time of life, with his features whimsically drawn upward as if they were
attracted by the roots of his hair. He had a peculiarly shining transparent complexion,
probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application; and his attractive hair, being cut
short, and being grizzled, and standing straight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted
by some invisible magnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick.
"But, to be sure, it's no business of mine," said Barbox Brothers. "That was an
impertinent observation on my part. Be what you like."
"Some people, sir," remarked Lamps in a tone of apology, "are sometimes what they
don't like."
"Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other. "I have been what I don't like, all
my life."
"When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little Comic- Songs--like--"
Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.
"--To composing little Comic-Songs-like--and what was more hard--to singing 'em
afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that time, it did indeed."
Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps's eye, Barbox Brothers withdrew his
own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and put a foot on the top bar. "Why did you
do it, then?" he asked after a short pause; abruptly enough, but in a softer tone. "If you
didn't want to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?"
To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside."
At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby Junction started
suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes. "She's got up!" Lamps announced,
excited. "What lays in her power is sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it's laid in
her power to get up to-night, by George!"
The legend "Barbox Brothers," in large white letters on two black surfaces, was very
soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent street, and, when the owner of the
legend had shivered on the pavement half an hour, what time the porter's knocks at the
Inn Door knocked up the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the
close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that
seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.
II
"You remember me, Young Jackson?"
"What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was you who told me
that was my name. It was you who told me that on every twentieth of December my life

had a penitential anniversary in it called a birthday. I suppose the last communication was
truer than the first!"
"What am I like, Young Jackson?"
"You are like a blight all through the year to me. You hard-lined, thin-lipped, repressive,
changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are like the Devil to me; most of all when
you teach me religious things, for you make me abhor them."
"You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?" In another voice from another quarter.
"Most gratefully, sir. You were the