The old joke about people
who had gone travelling years before, and were believed
to be still lost somewhere in the recesses of Kent,
revived itself amid gloomy approbation. The still older
discussion as to whether the South Eastern or the Brighton
was really the worst followed naturally in its wake,
and occupied its accustomed half-hour--complicated, however,
upon this occasion, by the chance presence of a loquacious
stranger who said he lived on the Chatham-and-Dover,
and who rejected boisterously the idea that any other
railway could be half so bad.
The intrusion of this outsider aroused instant resentment,
and the champions of the South Eastern and the Brighton,
having piled up additional defenses in the shape of
personal recollections of delay and mismanagement quite
beyond belief, made a combined attack upon the newcomer.
He was evidently incapable, their remarks implied,
of knowing a bad railway when he saw one. To suggest
that the characterless and inoffensive Chatham-and-Dover,
so commonplace in its tame virtues, was to be mentioned
in the same breath with the daringly inventive and
resourceful malefactors whose rendezvous was London Bridge,
showed either a weak mind or a corrupt heart. Did this man
really live on the Dover line at all? Angry countenances
plainly reflected the doubt.
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