can resist the thought of
that express by which, night after night, England is torn up its
centre? I love well that cab-drive in the chill autumnal night through
the desert of Bloomsbury, the dead leaves rustling round the horse's
hoofs as we gallop through the Squares. Ah, I shall be across the
Border before these doorsteps are cleaned, before the coming of the
milk-carts. Anon, I descry the cavernous open jaws of Euston. The
monster swallows me, and soon I am being digested into Scotland. I sit
ensconced in a corner of a compartment. The collar of my ulster is
above my ears, my cap is pulled over my eyes, my feet are on a
hot-water tin, and my rug snugly envelops most of me. Sleeping-cars are
for the strange beings who love not the act of travelling. Them I
should spurn even if I could not sleep a wink in an ordinary
compartment. I would liefer forfeit sleep than the consciousness of
travelling. But it happens that I, in an ordinary compartment, am blest
both with the sleep and with the consciousness, all through the long
night. To be asleep and to know that you are sleeping, and to know,
too, that even as you sleep you are being borne away through darkness
into distance--that, surely, is to go two better than Endymion. Surely,
nothing is more mysteriously delightful than this joint consciousness
of sleep and movement. Pitiable they to whom it is denied. All through
the night the vibration of the train keeps one-third of me awake, while
the other two parts of me profoundly slumber. Whenever the train stops,
and the vibration ceases, then the one-third of me falls asleep, and
the other two parts stir. I am awake just enough to hear the
hollow-echoing cry of 'Crewe' or 'York,' and to blink up at the
green-hooded lamp in the ceiling. May be, I raise a corner of the
blind, and see through the steam-dim window the mysterious, empty
station. A solitary porter shuffles along the platform. Yonder, those
are the lights of the refreshment room, where, all night long, a
barmaid is keeping her lonely vigil over the beer-handles and the
Bath-buns in glass cases. I see long rows of glimmering milk-cans, and
wonder drowsily whether they contain forty modern thieves. The engine
snorts angrily in the benighted silence. Far away is the faint,
familiar sound--clink-clank, clink-clank--of the man who tests the
couplings. Nearer and nearer the sound comes. It passes, recedes It is
rather melancholy.... A whistle, a jerk, and the two wakin