hts 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 further 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.

"O 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,
"doos 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 _doos_ go
off into a sidin'. But when she _can_ get a ch