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chinked, conveyances oppressed by nightmares of luggage came
careering into the yard, porters started up from secret
places, ditto the much-injured women, the shining bell, who
lived on a little tray of stilts by himself, flew into a
man's hand and clamoured violently. The pointsman aloft in
the signal-box made the motions of drawing, with some
difficulty, hogsheads of beer. Down Train! More beer. Up
Train! More beer. Cross Junction Train! More beer. Cattle
Train! More beer. Goods Train! Simmering, whistling,
trembling, rumbling, thundering. Trains on the whole
confusion of intersecting rails, crossing one another,
bumping one another, hissing one another, backing to go
forward, tearing into distance to come close. People
frantic. Exiles seeking restoration to their native
carriages, and banished to remoter climes. More beer and
more bell. Then, in a minute, the Station relapsed into
stupor as the stoker of the Cattle Train, the last to
depart, went gliding out of it, wiping the long nose of his
oilcan with a dirty pocket-handkerchief.
By night, in its unconscious state, the station was not so
much as visible. Something in the air, like an enterprising
chemist's established in business on one of the boughs of
Jack's beanstalk, was all that could be discerned of it
under the stars. In a moment it would break out, a
constellation of gas. In another moment, twenty rival
chemists, on twenty rival beanstalks, came into existence.
The, the Furies would be seen, waving their lurid torches up
and down the confused perspective of embankments and arches
- would be heard, too, wailing and shrieking. Then the
Station would be full of palpitating trains, as in the day;
with the heightening difference that they were not so
clearly seen as in the day, whereas the station walls,
starting forward under the gas, like hippopotamus's eyes,
dazzled the human locomotives with the sauce-bottle, the
cheap music, the bedstead, the distorted range of buildings
where the patent safes are made, the gentleman in the rain
with the registered umbrella, the lady returning from the
ball with the registered respirator, and all their other
embellishments. And now, the human locomotives, creased as
to their countenances and purblind as to their eyes, would
swarm forth in a heap, addressing themselves to the
mysterious urns and the much-injured women; while the iron
locomotives, dripping fire and water, shed their steam about
plenti-
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