“Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but—” Lamps, with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly added—“but it’s a blessed circumstance for you that it’s not open.”
“You couldn’t recommend it, I see, if it was available?”
“Ask your pardon, sir. If it was—?”
“Open?”
“It ain’t my place, as a paid servant of the company, to give my opinion on any of the company’s toepics,”—he pronounced it more like toothpicks,—“beyond lamp-ile and cottons,” returned Lamps in a confidential tone; “but, speaking as a man, I wouldn’t recommend my father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he’d be treated at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would not.”
The traveller nodded conviction. “I suppose I can put up in the town? There is a town here?” For the traveller (though a stay-at-home compared with most travellers) had been, like many others, carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through that Junction before, without having ever, as one might say, gone ashore there.
“Oh yes, there’s a town, sir! Anyways, there’s town enough to put up in. But,” following the glance of the other at his luggage, “this is a very dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest time. I might a’most call it our deadest and buriedest time.”
“No porters about?”
“Well, sir, you see,” returned Lamps, confidential again, “they in general goes off with the gas. That’s how it is. And they seem to have overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the platform. But, in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up.”
“Who may be up?”