oet, 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