The young fellow had lost the train that should have returned him in
forty minutes to the family he had not seen in six months; he was just
off shipboard, and felt the need of a bath and toilet upon steady
ground, with plenty of elbow room. He had come near having a bad fall,
and had not missed making a ludicrous spectacle of himself for the
entertainment of a gaping crowd. But he laughed in a jolly, gentlemanly
way, and again raising his hat passed on without a second glance at
the mute personage who had pushed the wagon directly across his track.
Like the rest of the disappointed wayfarers he walked quite up to the
outlet of the station, and peered anxiously through at the empty rails,
still vibrating from the wheels of the vanishing train, yet he neither
frowned nor swore. He did not even ask: “When does the next train go
to Fairhill?” The time-table in his pocket and that upon the wall,
set at “2 P. M.,” told him all and more than he wanted to know. The
excitement and suspense over, his inner man became importunate. He had
had an early breakfast on the _City of Rome_, and was far hungrier now
than then. Doubling upon his tracks, he repaired to the restaurant in
the same building with the vast waiting room and offices. The place was
clean, and full of odors that, for a wonder, were fresh and savory,
instead of hanging on the air and clinging to the walls like a viewless
“In Memoriam” of an innumerable caravan of dead-and-gone feasts. The
_menu_ was promising to an unsated appetite, and having given his
order to a waiter the even-tempered customer sat back in his chair and
surveyed the scene with the air of one whose mind was, as the hymnist
aptly puts it, “at leisure from itself.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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