“Strike?” I said, going up to the workmen. “Yes, general strike at twelve o’clock,” they answered, and I gathered up my book and coat. The rest of my luggage could not be recovered then, and next night it went wandering down the line upon the train, and was no more seen. For Christmas was coming, and many trains that were wandering upon the road supplied seasonable gifts for the peasants’ needs. Hundreds of nice geese and ducks they gave them, loads of vegetables, barrels of sugar. For miles beyond the city, the railway was like an enormous Christmas hamper, full of good cheer, and many a starving peasant recognized for the first time the true significance of the holy festival. As to the cleanly old man and woman, they sat there still, clutching their goods. It seemed that nothing short of the Last Trumpet could induce them to stir. They had taken their tickets, and their confidence in railways was unshaken. They looked at me with the sympathetic tolerance we show to a crank who questions gravitation or maintains the earth is flat. The peasants in like manner sat still and cherished their young. It seemed incredible they should not go after they had taken all that trouble to get started for home, and had settled down into their lairs in the nice warm train. I left them still seated there, amid expostulations growing shrill. But in the next fortnight I had to return many times to the station, and day after day I found them encamped in the waiting-rooms, one family living on a table by day and under it at night, another resolutely holding a leather bench, and two or three nested behind the bar. To keep them alive, the railway issued a dole of about a shilling a day for the grown-ups, and they cooked their tea and bits of food at the stoves or inside the locomotives. But it was not a happy way of spending life. Children sprawled and fought and wailed; mothers tried in vain to wash and clean; men tripped over girls asleep upon the boards. And it was worse when, a few days later, scores of soldiers dribbled in somehow from the war, unwashed, bewildered, and wretched, and were thrown into the station among the peasants, to live there as best they could. The smell of men’s tents in the morning in war time is not pleasant, but it is Arabia compared to those waiting-rooms.