Clank and fury and scream; by day and by night; squibbing like a fallen unspent comet the length of France, and leaving a shining trail as we go; by flat grey pastures, hardly billowing, and little churches with unfamiliar belfries, and rows of plumelike poplars, that pass and come again and flicker and dazzle like tall palings endlessly repeated; swooping at a perilous poise round the wine-shop ends of hamlets seemingly strayed and stranded in the fields, or grazing slow-crawling carts of a strange build, driven by stranger waggoners, as if the railway track were but a track after all, which we are wont to lose, and take up, and lose again; rushing, shrieking, upon little blue-smocked men, or, as often, women, who stand waving absurd flags at level-crossings, and only missing them, it appears, by the breadth of a wind-shaving; on again with a yell of baffled fury; ripping, periodically, if we may judge by the sound, a passage through match-wood stations, which fly into splinters about us, and disregarding all warning signals of long white arms flung up--so through a land, infinitely strange and wonderful to me, we go roaring southwards to our destiny. A wild new experience to a woodland hermit--marvellous by day; weird beyond expression in the rushing dark. What islander, self-contained in his little sphere, might have guessed the wizard potency of that slender streak of water called the Channel? One takes it at a gulp, and, lo! there is a world about one continents removed, it seems, from the life of one’s knowledge. A seventy times seven leagued boot is the little steamer into which one puts one’s foot, to reach at a step from Dover to Calais. It is a longer stride by all the world than from Dan to Beersheba. The red trousers of the soldiers on the pier strike the first colour note of dissonance. They have walked with Napoleon in Egypt. The blood mystery of the Sphinx is in their hue. And when night at last veils the scene from one’s aching eyes, and the shrieks, the eternal shrieks, are uttered in darkness, urging one on to what potential awakening in livid dawns--then is the time for dreams such as one has never dreamt before. When the throb of the engine claims one’s pulses to its beat, and its breath paints one with a sooty rime, and one feels oneself being slowly absorbed into the system of that crashing, hurtling monster--a small integral part of its mechanism--what hope seems left at last of any detachment from the chimera to which one has committed one’s destinies!