"Yes," said I.
"Stands out wonderful well!" he said again, and sighed, not profoundly, but in a manner that was very touching to hear.
When a little while later we crossed the Thames he moved his head slowly to look down at the water, and he sighed as we passed the town of Maidenhead. Then he said to me again spontaneously, "D'you often travel upon this line?"
I said I travelled upon it fairly often, and I asked him, since this appeared to strike some slight note of interest in his mind, whether he travelled upon it also. He answered, in a tone a little lower and sadder than that which he had used before and shaking his poor grey head from side to side. "Not now!... I did once.... But it was broad gauge then!" and again he sighed profoundly.
He continued upon this topic, which apparently had been one of the thin veins of interest in the mine of his heart. He told me they would never have anything like the old broad gauge again—never; and he shook his head pathetically once more. He proceeded to remember the name of Isambard Brunel, and he spoke of the Thames Tunnel and how men could go dry shod under the river. "Under the river! Dry shod from one shore to the other! Marvellous...."
Then, still on that theme, he referred to the Great Eastern and said what a mighty great ship she was.
"They will never have another like her—never! No one else will ever make a ship as big as that!"
Now at this point I would have contradicted him had I known him to be a man upon whom contradiction might act as a tonic and he might have told me something about his extraordinary self. For it is certain that now-a-days ships much larger than the Great Eastern and fifty times more efficient sail in and out of our harbours every hour. And I could even have told him that the Great Eastern had been broken up—but I did not know that such a truth might not provoke tears in those old eyes, so I forbore.
After a little pause he continued again, for he was now fairly on the run: "Wonderful thing—steam!" and then he was silent for a long while.
I began to wonder whether perhaps he was much older than I had guessed, but in a little while he settled this for me by talking to me with some enthusiasm of Lord Palmerston. It was an enthusiasm of youth. I know not how many metaphors he did not use. Little bits of sly slang—as dead as the pyramids—peeped into his conversation as he described his hero, and he would always end a paragraph of his panegyric by wagging his head and letting his heart sink again at the reflection that such men could not endure for ever.