THE PHANTOM FOURTH.
THEY were three.
It was in the cheap night-service train from Paris to Calais that I first met them.
Railways, as a rule, are among the many things which they do not order better in France, and the French Northern line is one of the worst managed in the world, barring none, not even the Italian vie ferrate. I make it a rule, therefore, to punish the directors of, and the shareholders in, that undertaking to the utmost within my limited ability, by spending as little money on their line as I can help.
It was, then, in a third-class compartment of the train that I met the three.
Three as hearty, jolly-looking Saxon faces, with stalwart frames to match, as one would be likely to meet in an hour’s walk from the Regent’s Park to the Mansion House.
One of the three was dark, the other two were fair. The dark one was the senior of the party. He wore an incipient full beard, evidently in process of training, with a considerable amount of grizzle in it.
The face of one of his companions was graced with a magnificent flowing beard. The third of the party, a fair-haired youth of some twenty-three or four summers, showed a scrupulously smooth-shaven face.
They looked all three much flushed and slightly excited, and, I must say, they turned out the most boisterous set of fellows I ever met.