The determination to keep awake was heroic, but without avail. Even the screaming and grumbling of the skid and the straining of the wheels down Spitalgate Hill into Grantham did not suffice to quite waken us. But what that noise and the jarring of the wheels failed to do, the stoppage at the “George” at Grantham and the sudden quiet _do_ succeed in. Our friend the moon has by now sunk to rest, and a pallid dawn has come; someone remarks that it is past three o’clock in the morning, and someone else is wakened and hauled forth from amid the snoring insides, whose snores become gasps and gulps, and then resolve themselves into the yawns and peevish exclamations of tired men. The person thus awakened proves to be a passenger who had booked to Colsterworth, which is a little village we have now left eight miles behind us. He had been asleep, and as Colsterworth is not one of our stopping or changing places, the guard forgot all about him until the change at Grantham. The passenger and the guard are now waging a furious war of words on the resounding pavements of the sleeping town. It seems that the unfortunate inside, besides being himself carried so far beyond his destination, has a heavy portmanteau in the like predicament. If he had been a little bigger and the guard a little smaller, his fury would perhaps make him fall upon that official and personally chastise him. As it is, he resorts to abuse. Windows of surrounding houses now begin to be thrown up, and nightcapped heads to inquire “what the d----l’s the matter, and if it can’t be settled somewhere else or at some more convenient season?” The guard says “This ’ere gent wot’s abusing of me like a blooming pickpocket goes to sleep and gets kerried past where he wants to get out, and when I pulls him out, ’stead of taking ’im him on to Newark or York, ’e----” “Shut up,” exclaims a fierce voice from above: “can’t a man get a wink of sleep for you fellows?” So, the change being put to, the altercation is concluded in undertones, and we roll off; the irate passenger to bed at the “George,” vowing he will get a legal remedy against the proprietors of the “Wellington” for the unheard-of outrage.