This, of itself, was a worth-while experience, for meeting friends at a London station is always exciting. To begin with, they are never there. You rush madly about from one ridiculous, inadequate ticket wicket to another,—from one absurd, inadequate waiting-room to another,—and then you think that after all they must have said Charing Cross.
Then you forget them, and become absorbed in watching the comic opera crowd of week-enders, in their neat travelling-suits of beflounced muslin, frilly lace scarfs, and stout boots.
The comic opera crowd of week-enders.
Wandering about in the luggage-room, I suddenly chanced upon my friends calmly sitting on their own boxes, and looking as if they had been evicted for not paying their rent.
And such a multiplicity of luggage as they had! I had contented myself with one box of goodly proportions, but my cherished friends had no less than twelve pieces of the varying patterns of enamelled blackness and pig-skinned brownness which only England knows.
Looking as if they had been evicted for not paying their rent.
“Why sit ye here idle?” I demanded.
“We await the psychical moment,” responded the Wag O’ The World; “you see they won’t stick our luggage sooner than ten minutes before train time, and they’re not allowed to stick it later than five minutes before train time. The game is to catch a porter between those times.”