The train looked absurdly small. McTaggart thought the station shrunk and his first English cup of tea was cold and strong, in a leaking pot.
Even the fields, as they left the Downs, seemed to have dwindled to half their size. The rain lashed against the glass. Between the streams trickling down he began to catch green vistas of hops with their quaint, peaked oast-houses like the caps worn by hob-goblins from the pages of a fairy book.
Rochester!—under leaden skies, smoky, blurred. The train rocked on, the shorter gauge oddly aggressive in the low-built, narrow carriage.
Then, at last, Charing Cross; the endless wait for the luggage and the final crowning disenchantment—no taxis!—due to "the strike."
After a dismal half hour a "runner" returned with a four wheeler and they both got in, hampered by baggage, neither of them in the best of tempers.
Mario was plainly aghast. "This—London?" he seemed to say.
"Yes—confound it!" thought McTaggart. He began to wish he had stayed abroad.
They crawled along, past Trafalgar Square and its dripping lions, past Hampton's, then, before the block of carriages outside the Carlton, swerved to the right.
Half way up the Haymarket hill McTaggart thrust his head out and shouted.
"Hi! Cabby—stop a minute." His face brightened as he spoke. He opened the door and splashed across the muddy pavement into a shop with a quaint old fashioned bow-window and asked for a box of cigarettes.