A spurt of damp steam saved me from apoplexy.  The train had lost patience at last, and was coming into the station directly beneath me to see what was the matter.  Happy voices sang and heads were thrust out all along the compartments, but none answered their songs or greetings.  She halted, and the people began to get out.  Then they began to get in again, as their friends in the waiting-rooms advised.  All did not catch the warning, so there was congestion at the doors, but those whom the bees caught got in first.

Still the bees, more bent on their own business than wanton torture, kept to the south end of the platform by the bookstall, and that was why the completely exposed engine-driver at the north end of the train did not at first understand the hermetically sealed stationmaster when the latter shouted to him many times to ‘get on out o’ this.’

‘Where are you?’ was the reply.  ‘And what for?’

‘It don’t matter where I am, an’ you’ll get what-for in a minute if you don’t shift,’ said the stationmaster.  ’Drop ’em at Parson’s Meadow and they can walk up over the fields.’

That bare-armed, thin-shirted idiot, leaning out of the cab, took the stationmaster’s orders as an insult to his dignity, and roared at the shut offices:  ’You’ll give me what-for, will you?  Look ’ere, I’m not in the ‘abit of—­’ His outstretched hand flew to his neck....  Do you know that if you sting an engine-driver it is the same as stinging his train?  She starts with a jerk that nearly smashes the couplings, and runs, barking like a dog, till she is out of sight.  Nor does she think about spilled people and parted families on the platform behind her.  I had to do all that.  There was a man called Fred, and his wife Harriet—­a cheery, full-blooded couple—­who interested me immensely before they battered their way into a small detached building, already densely occupied.  There was also a nameless bachelor who sat under a half-opened umbrella and twirled it dizzily, which was so new a game that I applauded aloud.

When they had thoroughly cleared the ground, the bees set about making comb for publication at the bookstall counter.  Presently some bold hearts tiptoed out of the waiting-rooms over the loud gravel with the consciously modest air of men leaving church, climbed the wooden staircase to the bridge, and so reached my level, where the inexhaustible bonnet-boxes were still vomiting squadrons and platoons.  There was little need to bid them descend.  They had wrapped their heads in handkerchiefs, so that they looked like the disappointed dead scuttling back to Purgatory.  Only one old gentleman, pontifically draped in a banner embroidered ‘Temperance and Fortitude,’ ran the gauntlet up-street, shouting as he passed me, ‘It’s night or Bluecher, Mister.’  They let him in at the White Hart, the pub. where I should have bought the beer.

After this the day sagged.  I fell to reckoning how long a man in a Turkish bath, weakened by excessive laughter, could live without food, and specially drink; and how long a disenfranchised bee could hold out under the same conditions.