“The remainder is easily told. The train had, on discovering my being left behind, sent back an engine to fetch me; but from a mistake of the driver, who was given to suppose that I had not entered the tunnel, he had kept the engine at half speed, and without the happy accident of the pistol and the flash of the powder, I should inevitably have been run down; for, even as it was, the collision drove my carriage about fifty yards backwards, an incident of which, happily, I neither was conscious at the time, nor suffered from afterwards.”
“That comes of travelling on a foreign railroad!” muttered a ruddy-faced old gentleman in drab shorts. “Those fellows have no more notion of how to manage an engine—”
“Than the Pope has of the polka,” chimed in a very Irish accent from the corner of the carriage.
“Very true, sir,” rejoined the former. “English is the only language to speak to the boiler. The moment they try it on with French or German, something goes wrong. You saw how they roasted the people at Versailles, and—”
“Ah! the devil a bit they know about it at all,” interposed the Emeralder. “The water is never more than lukewarm, and there ‘s more smoke out of the chap’s pipe that stands in front than out of the funnel. They ‘ve generally an engine at each end, and it takes twenty minutes at every station to decide which way they’ll go,—one wanting this way, and the other that.”
“Is it not better in Belgium?” asked I.
“Belgium, is it?—bad luck to it for Belgium: I ought to know something of how they manage. There is n’t a word of truth among them. Were you ever at Antwerp?”
“Yes; I have passed through it several times.”
“Well, how long does it take to go from Antwerp to Brussels?”
“Something more than an hour, if I remember aright.”