A TUBE NIGHTMARE. Have you ever dreamed a dream of a terrible tube journey, in which every one of the appalling things which might happen does actually occur? I dreamed one last night. The journey began with a disaster. On reaching the booking-office window I could not find any money, and it was only when the waiting crowd behind me, which had mounted to hundreds, was becoming offensively hostile that I succeeded in producing a five-pound note. The booking-clerk took her own time to count out the change, and on leaving the window I found four policemen struggling to keep back an infuriated mob of people, all shrieking imprecations and asking for my blood. There was but one thing for it--to get to a train before this angry horde could secure its tickets; so I made a wild dash for the moving-staircase, shedding Bradburys _en route_ like a paper-chase. As I rushed past the ticket-puncher she made a vicious lunge at my out-stretched hand with an enormous pair of pincers, missing the ticket and partially amputating my thumb. As I have always expected to do, but have never yet done, I missed my footing at the top of the escalator, and my desire to outstrip my enemies was realised beyond my wildest hopes as I crashed, by a series of petrifying somersaults, down the entire flight, to be belched forth like a sausage from a machine at the bottom. Tattered, torn and in unspeakable agony I picked myself up and found my steering-gear so damaged that I could only move sideways, crab-fashion, and in this manner I crawled on to the platform just as a train was beginning its exit. I make a leap for it. The gates crash to! Am I inside them or out? Neither. I am pinned there with the first half of my body struggling inside the car while the second half protrudes over the fast-receding platform. I remember how in my agony it flashed across my mind that I would never again slay a wasp with my fork. I must have been pulled into the car just in time to stop the tunnel (which is a dreadfully close fit) from bisecting me, for the next thing I remember was being dropped into a corner seat and severely admonished by the guard for getting into the train whilst it was in motion. I was now a quivering and shapeless mass; nobody pitied me, nobody helped me, so loathsome a spectacle did I present. Of course the train passed my station, and at the next I was thrown out like a mail-bag, to be trodden on by massed formations of travellers fighting to enter and leave the car by the same door at the same time. When the multitudes had dispersed and I was alone, by superhuman efforts I contrived to wriggle on my stomach to the foot of the ascending stairway, but not having sufficient strength to wriggle off on arrival at the top, my long-dreaded horror of being sucked under the barrier, where moving stairways disappear, was realised.