and clamoured violently. The pointsman aloft in the signal-box
made the motions of drawing, with some difficulty, hogsheads of
beer. Down Train! More bear! Up Train! More beer. Cross
junction Train! More beer! Cattle Train! More beer. Goods
Train! Simmering, whistling, trembling, rumbling, thundering.
Trains on the whole confusion of intersecting rails, crossing one
another, bumping one another, hissing one another, backing to go
forward, tearing into distance to come close. People frantic.
Exiles seeking restoration to their native carriages, and banished
to remoter climes. More beer and more bell. Then, in a minute,
the Station relapsed into stupor as the stoker of the Cattle Train,
the last to depart, went gliding out of it, wiping the long nose of
his oil-can with a dirty pocket-handkerchief.

By night, in its unconscious state, the Station was not so much as
visible. Something in the air, like an enterprising chemist's
established in business on one of the boughs of Jack's beanstalk,
was all that could be discerned of it under the stars. In a moment
it would break out, a constellation of gas. In another moment,
twenty rival chemists, on twenty rival beanstalks, came into
existence. Then, the Furies would be seen, waving their lurid
torches up and down the confused perspectives of embankments and
arches--would be heard, too, wailing and shrieking. Then, the
Station would be full of palpitating trains, as in the day; with
the heightening difference that they were not so clearly seen as in
the day, whereas the Station walls, starting forward under the gas,
like a hippopotamus's eyes, dazzled the human locomotives with the
sauce-bottle, the cheap music, the bedstead, the distorted range of
buildings where the patent safes are made, the gentleman in the
rain with the registered umbrella, the lady returning from the ball