Such spaces may be covered in those long night hours. I had never realised the like before--had never been sped so far, by hundreds of miles, against my own will of volition. My helplessness affected me like a personal humiliation. We would catch up tempests, and tunnel a mad course through them, and leave them battling and booming in our rear. In ragged spaces of the clouds the moon would shine out, tossing like a lightship on tumultuous waters, and disappear, and be another beacon on another shoal when seen again. The shadow of a world rushed by our windows, phantom fabrics caught in starry glimpses, and always seeming stranger as we fled. But I slept at last, and was whirled a passionless straw upon the tide. Very strange, in truth, was all this long journey to me. Yet it was taken in fullest possession of the antidote to its worst penalties. Johnny symbolised that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. I had already suspected the fact; now I was convinced of it. The subtle aroma of his godhead had flown abroad, and our way thenceforth was to be clouded with the incense of mammon-worship. It was not enough that his purse had secured us every luxury meet to the amelioration of our hard lot; obsequious officials, in a democratic land, clamoured for the privilege of making our primrose path primrosier and the down of our cushions downier. They were so downy themselves, that if they had plucked their breasts like swans for our nesting, we should have been suffocated long before they were denuded. However, the attention brought its advantages to all but poor Johnny himself, whose way was made rocks and briars to him. On and on unceasing tears the mad comet, until striking, after æons of flight, it seems, a mountain rampart, with a mighty crash and scatteration of sparks it goes to earth, and is quenched and buried from the eyes of the world in the Mont Cenis tunnel.