would look down upon me reprovingly but not unkindly, observing to the
carriage generally: "It's a funny thing, ain't it, nobody's ever made
a boy yet that could keep still for ten seconds." After which he
would pat me heartily on the head, to show he was not vexed with me,
and fall to sleep again upon me. He was a good-tempered man.

My mother sat occupied chiefly with her own thoughts, and my aunt had
found a congenial companion in a lady who had had her cap basket sat
upon; so I was left mainly to my own resources. When I could get my
head free of the big man's back, I gazed out of the window, and
watched the flying fragments as we shed the world. Now a village
would fall from us, now the yellow corn-land would cling to us for
awhile, or a wood catch at our rushing feet, and sometimes a strong
town would stop us, and hold us, panting for a space. Or, my eyes
weary, I would sit and listen to the hoarse singing of the wheels
beneath my feet. It was a monotonous chaunt, ever the same two lines:

"Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again,"

followed by a low, rumbling laugh. Sometimes fortissimo, sometimes
pianissimo; now vivace, now largo; but ever those same two lines, and
ever followed by the same low, rumbling laugh; still to this day the
iron wheels sing to me that same song.

Later on I also must have slept, for I dreamt that as the result of my
having engaged in single combat with a dragon, the dragon, ignoring
all the rules of Fairyland, had swallowed me. It was hot and stuffy
in the dragon's stomach. He had, so it appeared to me, disgracefully
overeaten himself; there were hundreds of us there, entirely