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Page 6:-
her in charge should hold her feet, slap her hands, and
bring her to; now, burrowed into tunnels with a stubborn and
undemonstrative energy so confusing that the train seemed to
be flying back into leagues of darkness. Here, were station
after station, swallowed up by the express without stopping;
here, stations where it fired itself in like a volley of
cannon-balls, swooped away four country-people with
nosegays, and three men of business with portmanteaus, and
fired itself off again, bang, bang, bang! At long intervals
were uncomfortable refreshment-rooms, made more
uncomfortable by the scorn of Beauty towards Beast, the
public (but to whom she never relented, as Beauty did in the
story, towards the other Beast), and where sensitive
stomachs were fed, with a contemptuous sharpness occasioning
indigestion. Here, again, were stations with nothing going
but a bell, and wonderful wooden razors set aloft on great
posts, shaving the air. In these fields, the horses, sheep,
and cattle were well used to the thundering meteor, and
didn't mind; in those, they were all set scampering
together, and a herd of pigs scoured after them. The
pastoral country darkened, became coaly, became smoky,
became infernal, got better, got worse, improved again, grew
rugged, turned romantic; was a wood, a stream, a chain of
hills, a gorge, a moor, a cathedral town, a fortified place,
a waste. Now, miserable black dwellings, a black canal, and
sick black towers of chimneys; now, a trim garden, where the
flowers were bright and fair; now, a wilderness of hideous
altars all a-blaze; now, the water meadows with their fairy
rings; now, the mangy patch of unlet building ground outside
the stagnant town, with the larger ring where the Circus was
last week. The temperature changed, the dialect changed, the
people changed, faces got shaper, manner got short, eyes got
shrewder and harder; yet all so quickly, that the spruce
guard in the London uniform and silver lace, had not yet
rumpled his shirt-collar, delivered half the dispatches in
his shiny little pouch, or read his newspaper.
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