clean frock just put on this
mornin' only fit for the wash-tub now?"

But John was an easy-going man. He was mild, kind, sedate,
undemonstrative by nature, and looked upon slight matrimonial breezes as
being good for the health. It was only Gertie who could draw him into
demonstrations of feeling such as we have described, and, as we have
said, she always reciprocated them violently, increasing thereby the
wash-tub necessity tenfold.

It would have been strange indeed if John Marrot could have been much
put about by a small matrimonial breeze, seeing that his life was spent
in riding on an iron monster with white-hot lungs and boiling bowels
which carried him through space day and night at the rate of fifty miles
an hour! This, by the way, brings us back to our text--earthquakes.

Gertie's house--or Gertie's father's house, if you prefer it--stood
close to the embankment of one of our great arterial railways--which of
them, for reasons best known to ourself, we don't intend to tell, but,
for the reader's comfort, we shall call it the Grand National Trunk
Railway. So close did the house stand to the embankment that timid
female passengers were known occasionally to scream as they approached
it, under the impression that the train had left the rails and was about
to dash into it--an impression which was enhanced and somewhat justified
by the circumstance that the house stood with one of its corners;
instead of its side, front, or back; towards the line; thereby inducing
a sudden sensation of wrongness in the breasts of the twenty thousand
passengers who swept past it daily. The extreme edge of its most
protruding stone was exactly three yards four inches--by measurement--
from the left rail of the down line.

Need we say more to account for the perpetual state of earthquakedom, in
which that house was involved?

But the tremors and shocks to which it was exposed--by night and by
day--was not all it had to bear. In certain directions of the wind it
was intermittently enveloped in clouds of mingled soot and steam, and,
being situated at a curve on the line where signalling became imminently
needful, it was exposed to all the varied horrors of the whistle from
the sharp screech of interrogation to the successive bursts of
exasperation, or the prolonged and deadly yell of intimidation, with all
the intermediate modulations--so that, what with the tremors, and
shocks, and crashes, and shrieks, and thunderous roar of