In the days of yore, whenever any new pestilence or distemper fell from heaven upon the sons of men, the first thing to agitate the human mind was a strong and bitter controversy. Chiron, the son of Philyra, and Melampus of Amythaon, instead of attacking the common foe, fell pell-mell upon one another, maintaining or spurning their various doctrines--contagion, infection, epidemism, conduction by water, by earth, by wind--until they were driven to run away headlong, or lie down forever. Such questions surpass our understanding. But one malady there is, contagious, infectious, endemic also as well as epidemic, grandly contemptuous of pill and bolus, sticky as a limpet, while as slimy as a slug, and the name of this blessed disease is--"The Blues." And the beauty of it is, that everybody who has got it believes that he alone of all the people in the neighbourhood is free from every atom of a symptom of it. As his luck, or perhaps mine, would have it, Strogue was in the blues, when he came to Charing Cross. He received me with a grunt, and would say nothing, except to be down upon the cabman, and the porters, and shove his way along as if there were no English language. This is a very useful way to go to work, whenever you can be quite certain that you are the biggest fellow in the place, with no one to try to think otherwise. But unless there is money right and left behind it, at a big railway station it does not succeed. "You are not among the niggers yet," I said, being always polite to everybody, and indignant at not being allowed to speak, while his voice rang along the glazing. But he deigned me no answer, not even a glance, but shouted out "Third Class! Where the devil are you driving to? Have you never seen the Chairman of this Line?" The porters were too wide-awake to do anything but grin, and touch their caps ironically, and then he said "First Class," whereupon they all believed him. Not a word however would he say to me, though we had all the carriage to ourselves at starting; so I took him at his humour, and went to the other window, and drowned all my anxieties in "The Money Market." Possibly his heart was heavy about the landlady of the "London Rock," or the barmaid thereof, or the daughter of the Boots, if a maiden there were in that capacity; or perhaps a traveller even so well-seasoned could not bid adieu to his native land once more, without emotions honourable to his head and heart alike. Then the contagion of his low spirits began to spread around me, like the influenza vapour; and if he had tried to talk, I should not have cared to answer.