'Nineteen miles! They'll never bring me there, by horse, under two hours, they are so cursed tedious. Why have not you a spare engine at a place like this? Shillingsworth! Nice management! Are you certain? Where's the station-master?' All this time he kept staring after the faint pulsations on the air that indicated the flight of the engine. But it would not do. The train--the image upon earth of the irrevocable, the irretrievable--was gone, neither to be overtaken nor recalled. The telegraph was not then, as now, whispering secrets all over England, at the rate of two hundred miles a second, and five shillings per twenty words. Larkin would have given large money for an engine, to get up with the train that was now some five miles on its route, at treble, quadruple, the common cost of such a magical appliance; but all was vain. He could only look and mutter after it wildly. Vain to conjecture for what station that traveller in the battered hat was bound! Idle speculation! Mere distraction! Only that Mr. Larkin was altogether the man he was, I think he would have cursed freely. CHAPTER LXIX. OF A SPECTRE WHOM OLD TAMAR SAW. Little Fairy, all this while, continued, in our Church language, 'sick and weak.' The vicar was very sorry, but not afraid. His little man was so bright and merry, that he seemed to him the very spirit of life. He could not dream of his dying. It was sad, to be sure, the little man so many days in his bed, too languid to care for toy or story, quite silent, except when, in the night time, those weird monologues began which showed that the fever had reached his brain. The tones of his pleasant little voice, in those sad flights of memory and fancy, busy with familiar scenes and occupations, sounded wild and plaintive in his ear. And when 'Wapsie' was mentioned, sometimes the vicar's eyes filled, but he smiled through this with a kind of gladness at the child's affection. 'It will soon be over, my darling! You will be walking with Wapsie in a week again.' The sun could as soon cease from shining as little Fairy from living. The thought he would not allow near him. Doctor Buddle had been six miles away that evening with a patient, and looked in at the vicar's long after the candles were lighted. He was not satisfied with little Fairy--not at all satisfied. He put his hand under the clothes and felt his thin, slender limbs--thinner than ever now. Dry and very hot they were--and little man babbling his nonsense about little boys, and his 'Wapsie,' and toys, and birds, and the mill-stream, and the church-yard--of which, with so strange a fatality, children, not in romance only, but reality, so often prattle in their feverish wanderings.