Swifter, swifter, train, absorb the miles! That white house below the chimney stack on the horizon there, shall we never outstrip it? Grinning there in its unapproachable immobility! Ah, now, the horizon swivels round on a pivot, and swift for your callous face, oh, white, grinning house! Wind, wind, what message do you bring from her? Is she waiting? No, no, I shall not come too late! Who's speaking? "That'll do, young feller-me-lad!" The draught has awakened the dozing fat man. His lips vibrate with growing indignation. "Shoot that winder oop and sit tha down! Awake sin' fower o'th'clock and tha wilt go playin' tricks with winders, wilt'a... ?" The window is replaced along the full length of its groove, and with a rumbling from the gills, a slight outraged crest-heavy swinging, the fat man once more slides away into somnolence. What shall he do as the slow miles dawdle by? Poetry! How long he has deserted poetry! What strange affinity had there been between poetry and beetles! Rarely, rarely since those old days of crackling wall-paper and whisperful spent cinders where the beetles crawled, had a pencil, busy a moment ago on the annotation of vacuous texts, found itself scrawling rhymes and dreams. He had felt that poetry would not come his way again, but now ... as the train beat like a living pulse, now that his own heart seemed to be moving forward and backward again, a great shining piston ... He hunted in his pockets for a pencil, took out a blunt stump, and lifted an envelope from the same pocket. With a quick dart of anguish he realized it was the last letter he had received from Channah, where already the signature of his mother sprawled with the impotence of death. He flung the pencil away as if the impulse which had produced it from his pocket had been treason. He remembered with bitter mirth an anticipatory consolation he had once frequently imbibed. At the same time as he had persistently assured himself of his mother's immortality, he had whispered, smirking, "Yes, but when she does die, won't I start writing wonderful poetry! Marvellous elegies that'll make Gray sound like a threepenny kettledrum! I'll make 'em sit up! And I'll have a little book bound in soft red leather..." The tortured lad winced as he brought to mind the old fatuity. He would make capital out of her death, would he, little books bound in soft red leather! How well he knew now he would be like a fallen leaf on a road trodden by a thousand feet! Oh, swifter, train! Never train moved so slowly! He moved from against the fat man and pushed the opposite seat ludicrously with his feet to bring the train sooner to Doomington.