steam and smoke that he saw, as he sat in the train thinking of her;
whether her face would have any pensive shadow on it as they died out of
the distant view from her window; whether, in telling him he had done her
so much good, she had not unconsciously corrected his old moody bemoaning
of his station in life, by setting him thinking that a man might be a
great healer, if he would, and yet not be a great doctor; these and other
similar meditations got between him and his Welsh picture. There was
within him, too, that dull sense of vacuity which follows separation from
an object of interest, and cessation of a pleasant pursuit; and this
sense, being quite new to him, made him restless. Further, in losing
Mugby Junction, he had found himself again; and he was not the more
enamoured of himself for having lately passed his time in better company.

But surely here, not far ahead, must be the great ingenious town. This
crashing and clashing that the train was undergoing, and this coupling on
to it of a multitude of new echoes, could mean nothing less than approach
to the great station. It did mean nothing less. After some stormy
flashes of town lightning, in the way of swift revelations of red brick
blocks of houses, high red brick chimney-shafts, vistas of red brick
railway arches, tongues of fire, blocks of smoke, valleys of canal, and
hills if coal, there came the thundering in at the journey's end.

Having seen his portmanteaus safely housed in the hotel he chose, and
having appointed his dinner hour, Barbox Brothers went out for a walk in
the busy streets. And now it began to be suspected by him that Mugby
Junction was a Junction of many branches, invisible as well as visible,
and had joined him to an endless number of by-ways. For, whereas he
would, but a little while ago, have walked these streets blindly
brooding, he now had eyes and thoughts for a new external world. How the
many toiling people lived, and loved, and died; how wonderful it was to