A RAILWAY ROMANCE. MY ADVENTURE IN THE FLYING SCOTSMAN. MY ADVENTURE IN THE FLYING SCOTSMAN: _A ROMANCE OF_ London and North-Western Railway Shares. BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS. LONDON: JAMES HOGG AND SONS, 7 LOVELL'S COURT, PATERNOSTER ROW. 1888. _All Rights reserved._ Richard Clay & Sons, BREAD STREET HILL, LONDON; _Bungay, Suffolk_. INTRODUCTION. The following story was told me by that meek but estimable little man who forms the central figure in it. I have made him relate the strange vicissitudes of his life in the first person, and, by doing so, preserve, I venture to believe, some quaintness of thought and expression that is characteristic of him. MY ADVENTURE IN THE FLYING SCOTSMAN. CHAPTER I. A DANGEROUS LEGACY. The rain gave over about five o'clock, and the sun, having struggled unavailingly all day with a leaden November sky, burst forth in fiery rage, when but a few short minutes separated him from the horizon. His tawny splendour surrounded me as I trudged from Richmond, in Surrey, to the neighbouring hamlet of Petersham. Above me the wet, naked branches of the trees shone red, and seemed to drip with blood; the hedgerows sparkled their flaming gems; in the meadows, which I struck across to save time, parallel streaks of crimson lay along the cart-ruts. All nature glowed in the lurid light, and, to a mind fraught with much trouble and anxiety, there was something sinister in the slowly dying illumination, in the lowering, savage sky, in the bars of blood that sank hurtling together into the west, and in the vast cloudlands of gloom that were now fast bringing back the rain and the night.