This seemed an admirable arrangement, and in a couple of minutes he had set off. The light cast by the lantern was excellent; it shone brightly to guide his path, and gleamed on the rails of the four tracks as they pointed in narrowing perspective up the black cavern that lay before him until they were lost in the darkness. He walked on the right-hand side of the tunnel; immediately on his left, was the main line from Southampton to Liverpool, along which he would soon return at a brisker pace than that which was his now. For some hundreds of yards the gray glimmer from the end of the tunnel where he had entered also cast a diffused light into the darkness, but as he proceeded the light faded and grew dim, and when he was now some third of the way through, the slight continuous bend in the tunnel, which had been necessary in order to avoid a belt of unstable and shifty strata, obscured it altogether, and he walked, but for the light from his lantern, in absolute darkness. His own footsteps echoed queerly from the curved vault, but there was otherwise dead silence save for some occasional drip of water; all outside noises of the world were entirely cut off from him. He was stepping along thus when he saw, with a sudden start of horror, that there was something dark lying between the second and third pair of rails a little way ahead of him. From the fact that he started, he was conscious that his nerves were not working with their accustomed smoothness and coolness, and he heard his heart hammering in his throat. Then he pulled himself together, crossed the two rails which lay between him and it, turned the lantern on it, and saw next moment, with a spasm of relief, that it was only a coat, left there and forgotten, no doubt, by some workman. With a cheap impulse of kindness, he picked it up, meaning to leave it with his lantern at the signal-box at the far end. But as he picked it up and stepped on again to regain the side path where he had been walking, his foot tripped in it, or on the corner of some sleeper, and he fell forward, the lantern flying from his hand, and smashing itself to atoms on the hard metal of the road, and his head struck full on the temple against the steel of the track. The blow completely stunned him.