I gladly consented. And here let me state a fact,
which added then to my interest in my fellow-passenger, and will serve
now to excuse the enormity of smoking in a railway carriage. We were
going to the same place--we must be; and nobody would enter that
carriage to-night, but the man who had to clean it. For, although we
were shooting along at a terrible rate, the train would not stop to
set us down, but would cast us loose a mile from our station; and some
minutes after it had shot by like an infernal comet of darkness, our
carriage would trot gently up to the platform, as if it had come from
London all on its own hook--and thought nothing of it.
We were a long way yet, however, from our destination. The night grew
darker and colder, and after the necessary unmuffling occasioned by
the cigar process, we drew our wraps closer about us, leaned back in
our corners, and smoked away in silence; the red glow of our cigars
serving to light the carriage nearly as well as the red nose of the
neglected and half-extinguished lamp. For we were in a second-class
carriage, a fact for which I leave the clergyman to apologize: it is
nothing to me, for I am nobody.
But, after all, I fear I am unjust to the Railway Company, for there
was light enough for me to see, and in some measure scrutinize, the
face of my fellow-passenger.
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