Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Cæsar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence. “—Yours, sir?” The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the question. “O! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two portmanteaus are mine. Are you a Porter?” “On Porter’s wages, sir. But I am Lamps.” The traveller looked a little confused. “Who did you say you are?” “Lamps, sir,” showing an oily cloth in his hand, as further explanation. “Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?” “Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but—” Lamps, with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly added—“but it’s a blessed circumstance for you that it’s not open.” “You couldn’t recommend it, I see, if it was available?” “Ask your pardon, sir. If it was—?” “Open?” “It ain’t my place, as a paid servant of the company to give my opinion on any of the company’s toepics,” he pronounced it more like toothpicks, “beyond lamp-ile and cottons,” returned Lamps, in a confidential tone; “but speaking as a man, I wouldn’t recommend my father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he’d be treated at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would _not_.” The traveller nodded conviction. “I suppose I can put up in the town? There is a town here?” For the traveller (though a stay-at-home compared with most travellers) had been, like many others, carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through that Junction before, without having ever, as one might say, gone ashore there. “O yes, there’s a town, sir. Anyways there’s town enough to put up in. But,” following the glance of the other at his luggage, “this is a very dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest time. I might a’most call it our deadest and buriedest time.” “No porters about?”