Bull Garnet took a second–class ticket. His extravagance towards the cabman was the last he would ever exhibit. He felt a call upon him now to save for his family every farthing. All was lost to them but money, and alas, too much of that. Now if he cut his throat in the train, could he be attainted of felony? And would God be any the harder on him? No, he did not think He would. It might be some sort of atonement even. But then the shock to Pearl and Bob, to see him brought home with his head hanging back, and hopeless red stitches under it. It would make the poor girl a maniac, after all the shocks and anguish he had benumbed her with already. What a fool he had been not to buy strychnine, prussic acid, or laudanum! And yet—and yet—and yet——He would like to see them just once more—blessed hearts—once more. He sat in the last compartment of the last carriage in the train, which had been added, in a hurry, immediately behind the break van, and the swinging and the jerking very soon became tremendous. He knew not, neither cared to know, that Simon Chope and Bailey Kettledrum were in a first–class carriage near the centre of the train. Presently the violent motion began to tell upon him, and he felt a heavy dullness creeping over his excited mind; and all the senses, which had been during several hours of tension as prompt and acute as ever they were in his prime of power, began to flag, and daze, and wane, and he fell into a waking dream, a “second person” of sorrow. But first—whether for suicide, or for self–defence, he had tried both doors and found them locked; and he was far too large a man to force his way through the window. He dreamed, with a loose sense of identity, about the innocent childhood, the boyhoodʼs aspiration, the young manʼs sense of ability endorsing the right to aspire. Even his bodily power and vigour revived in the dream before him, and he knitted his muscles, and clenched his fists, and was ready to fight fools and liars. Who had fought more hard and hotly against the hard cold ways of the age, the despite done to the poor and lowly, the sarcasm bred by self–conscious serfdom in clever men of the world, the preference of gold to love, and of position to happiness? All the weak gregarious tricks, shifts of coat, and pupa–ism, whereby we noble Christians reduce our social history to a passage in entomology, and quench the faith of thinking men in Him whose name we take in vain—the great Originator—all these feminine contradictions, and fond things foully invented, fables Atellan (if they be not actually Fescennine) had roused the combatism of young Bull, ere he learned his own disgrace.