Note 3. We had intended to devote much larger space to this most interesting line, but the nature of our book forbids it. We quit the subject regretfully; referring the reader, who may desire to know more, to an able notice of the Metropolitan Railway in “The Shops and Companies of London,” edited by Henry Mayhew.
Chapter Seven.
Little Gertie comes out in a New Light, and Bob Receives Good News.
Poor little earnest curly-haired Gertie had been so thoroughly reared in the midst of crashing sounds and dire alarms without any mischance resulting, that she had come to feel at last as if the idea of danger or disaster were a mere fiction. It was therefore a new and terrible shock which she received, when she saw her father carried to his cottage by four railway porters and tenderly laid in his bed; and it went to her heart with an unaccountable thrill when she heard her father’s usually loud hearty voice say, in soft, womanly tones, “Thank ’ee, lads; thank ’ee. I’ll be all right soon, please God. Good-night and thank ’ee kindly.”
“Good-night—good-night, Jack,” they replied in various tones of cheeriness; for these hard-muscled men had soft hearts, and although they entertained fears for their friend, they were anxious, by the hearty tones of their voices, to keep up his spirits.
“You mustn’t take on like that, Missis,” whispered one of them as they were leaving the cottage door; “the doctor said for sartin that there warn’t no bones broken, and ’e didn’t think there was nothink internal.”
“It ain’t that I’m afear’d of,” whimpered poor Mrs Marrot, “but it does go to my ’art so, to ’ear my John speak in that voice. I never ’ear’d him do it except once before, when he was very low with fever, an’ thought himself a-dyin’.”