The railway journey was precisely like any other; he saw many places new to him, Taunton, with all its pleasant villages and beautiful orchards, and Salisbury with its wonderful spire, among others, and after a run of two hundred and twenty miles his train ran clanking into Waterloo Station. After traversing miles of streets (which he thought would never come to an end), about ten at night, and with a heart beating almost painfully with excitement, young Derval found himself in the mighty wilderness of London, and surrounded by more people than he thought the world contained, and an appalling bustle, strange lights and sights and sounds, and where all men seemed to be engaged in a race with time and for bare existence. By the guard who had him in charge he was taken to an hotel; excitement rendered him incapable of eating, and weary with intense thinking he went supperless to bed. Sooth to say, he felt very friendless and miserable. He dearly loved his father, despite his later abstraction and coldness, and already he was longing to see his face again, and the face, too, of Patty Fripp, who had been a mother to him. He had left home but that morning, and already ages seemed to have lapsed since then. The thoughts of Robinson Crusoe, Captain Cook, Peter Simple, and so forth, failed now to keep up his spirits in the unutterable loneliness of his condition; already he wept for the home he had so lately quitted and loathed, and from which he had been literally driven; but he had no anger at any one there now--not even Mrs. Hampton; and folding his hands, he repeated the prayers, from which mockery was soon to make him refrain when on board the good ship _Amethyst_. George Eliot says truly that "daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else, for the night presses on our imagination--the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of measurable reality." The day that dawned was scarcely one calculated to rouse the ardour or spirits even of a lad, as it was one of the Cimmerian darkness, a London fog, when the omnibuses ceased to ply, and not even the boldest cabby would undertake to convey Derval to the West India Docks, a state of things which greatly perplexed him, as the yellow opaqueness that now surrounded him was so different from the thin white mists that came at times from the Bristol Channel.