Taking into account the physical curtailments of Overdale's companions,
the trio consisted of about two men and a half.

Dennis now proposed that they should go on with the song, he
volunteering to sing the verses, and requesting the reinforcements to
show their strength when he said, "_Chorius_"--the mention of music
excited Overdale's harmonic devil again, and he was obliged to twist his
neckerchief until he was black in the face, to choke down an embryo,
"tooral," which ran to his lips before the cue came, and seemed to
insist upon an immediate and stormy exit; by dint of the most
suffocating exertions he succeeded in keeping back the musical torrent
until the end of the verse, when it broke forth with a vengeance.

And then Wagstaff struck in, and Dennis took a long breath, and _he_
struck in; and they waked up a couple of children, and _they_ struck in;
and Dennis put his wooden leg on the tail of a dog, and _he_ struck in;
and the locomotive put on the final touch, by shrieking with a frightful
yell, as if it had boiled down into one, the squalls of eleven hundred
freshly-spanked babies.

And they kept on, Dennis singing, in a masterly manner, the historical
part; the charms of Dinah the barbarity of the cruel parient, the
despair of Vilikins, the death and burial of the unfortunate "lovyers,"
their subsequent ghastly reappearance to the cruel parient, and his
final remorse, had all been related; the "chorus of tender maidens" had
been pathetically sung by the musical trio; the "chorus of cruel and
unnatural parients," had been indignantly disposed of; the "chorus of
pisoned young women," had been spasmodically executed: the "chorus of
agonized young men, with an awful pain in the stummack," had been
convulsively performed; the "chorus of cold corpuses," had been
sepulchrally consummated; and the musical enthusiasts were laying out
their most lugubrious strength on the "concluding dismal chorus of
gloomy apparitions," when the concert was interrupted by the train
running off the track and pitching a part of the passengers into a
sand-bank on the right, throwing the remainder into frog-pond on the
left, and gently depositing the engineer on a brush heap, where he was
afterwards discovered with the bell-rope in his hand, and his legs
covered up by the smoke-pipe.

It was soon ascertained that no very serious damage was done, beyond the
demolition of the engine, which had left the rail without cause or
provocati