“They pass us by as the idle wind, when the clouds are like a whale, ladies, having overcome us for a moment, like a summer dream. Hark to that thrush, sitting perhaps on his eggs”—”Oh, Oh!” from the gallery of nature—”can there be, I pause for a reply, anything but harmony, where the voices of the night pervade, and the music of the spheres?”
“You—you do speak so splendidly, dear,” sobbed Mrs. Kettledrum from the corner; “but it is a nasty, wicked, cruel story, about dear papa saying that of me, and he in his grave, poor dear, quite unable to vindicate himself. I have always thought it so unchristian to malign the dead!”
“Whatʼs that?” cried Georgie, starting up, in fear and hot earnest; “you are chattering so, you hear nothing.”
A horse dashed by them at full gallop, with his rider on his neck, shouting and yelling, and clinging and lashing.
“Missed the wheel by an inch,” cried Kettledrum, drawing his head in faster than he had thrust it out; “a fire, man, or a French invasion?” But the man was out of hearing, while the Kettledrum horses, scared, and jumping as from an equine thunderbolt, tried the strength of leather and the courage of ladies.
Meanwhile at the station behind them there was a sad ado. A man was lifted out of the train, being found in the last compartment by the guard who knew his destination—a big man, and a heavy one; and they bore him to the wretched shed which served there as a waiting–room.
“Dead, I believe,” said the guard, having sent a boy for brandy, “dead as a door–nail, whoever he be.”
“Not thee knaw who he be?” cried a forester, coming in. “Whoy, marn, there be no mistaking he. He be our Muster Garnet.”
“Whew!” And the train whistled on, as it must do, whether we live or die, or when Cyclops has made mince of us.