After that, he went to the other end of the basement, to pay his usual visit to the delivery department. Interminable corridors ran along, lighted by gas; to the right and the left, the reserves, closed in with gratings, seemed like so many subterranean stores, a complete commercial district, with its haberdashery, underclothing, glove, toy and other shops, all sleeping in the gloom. Further on stood one of the three hot-air stoves; further still, was a post of firemen guarding the main gas-meter, enclosed in its iron cage. He found, in the delivery department, the sorting tables already littered with heaps of parcels, band-boxes, and cases which were continually arriving in large hampers; and Campion, the superintendent, gave him particulars about the current work, whilst the twenty men placed under his orders distributed the parcels among large compartments, each of which bore the name of a district of Paris, and whence the messengers took them up to the vans waiting beside the foot pavement. There was a succession of cries, names of streets and other instructions were shouted out, quite an uproar arose, all the bustle of a mail-boat about to leave her moorings. And he stood there for a moment, motionless, watching this emission of goods which he had just seen the house absorb at the opposite end of the basement: the huge current ended here; it was here that it discharged itself into the street again after filling the tills with gold. But his eyes became dim, this colossal business no longer had any importance for him; he had but one idea, that of going away to some distant land, and abandoning everything, should she persist in saying no.