The train ran on and on

Then something surprising happened.  I saw the earth leap up and invade the sky and the sky drop down and blot out the earth event table rental, and I felt as though my wings were broken.  Then the sides of the carriage closed in and squeezed out the door like a pip out of an orange, until there was only a three-cornered gap left.  The air was full of dust, and I sneezed again and again, but could not find my pocket-handkerchief.  Presently a young man came and lifted me out through the hole, and seemed very surprised that I was not hurt.  I realised that there had been an accident, for the train was broken into pieces and the permanent way was very untidy.  Close at hand I saw the little girl sitting on a bank, and a man kneeling at her feet taking her boots off.  I would have liked to speak to her, but I remembered how she had refused the offer of my magazines, and was afraid she would p. 13snub me again.  The place was very noisy, for people were calling out, and there was a great sound of steam.  I noticed that everybody’s face was very white, especially the guard’s, which made his beard seem as black as soot.  The young man took me by the hand and led me along the uneven ground, and there was so much to see that my feet kept stumbling over things, and he had to hold me up.  On the way we passed the body of a man lying with a rug over his head.  I knew that he was dead; but I had seen drunken men in the streets lie like that, and I could not help looking about for the policeman.  Soon we came to a little station, and the platform was crowded with people who would not stand still, but walked round and round making noises.  When I climbed up on the platform a woman caught hold of me and cried over me.  One of her tears fell on my ear and tickled me direct subsidy school; but she held me so tightly that I could not put up my hand to rub it.  Her breath was hot on my head.

Then I heard a detested voice say, “Poor little boy, so tired!” and I shuddered back p. 14into consciousness of the world that was least interesting of all the worlds I knew.  I need not have opened my eyes to be sure that the aunts were at their fell work again, and that the little girl’s snub nose was tilted to a patronising angle.  Had I awakened a minute later she, too, would have joined in the auntish chorus of compassion for my weakness.  As it was, I looked at her with drowsy pity, finding that she was one of those luckless infants who might as well stay at home for all the fun they get out of travelling.  She knew no better than to scream when the train ran into a tunnel; what would she have done if she had seen my roc?

 and still I throned it in my corner, awake or dreaming, indisputably master of all the things that counted.  The three aunts faded into antimacassars Master of Fine Art Hong Kong; the little girl endured her uninteresting life and became an aunt and an antimacassar in her turn, and still I swung my legs in my corner seat, a boy-errant in the strange places of the world.  I do not remember the name of the station at which the bearded guard p. 15ultimately brought me out of my dreams.  I do remember standing stiffly on the platform and deciding that I had been travelling night and day for three hundred years.  When I communicated this fact to the relatives who met me they were strangely unimpressed; but I knew that when I returned home to my brothers they would display a decent interest in the story of my wanderings.  After all, you can’t expect grown-up people to understand everything!