He had at length got back to his hotel room, and was standing before his fire refreshing himself with a glass of hot drink which he had stood upon the chimney-piece, when he heard the town clocks striking, and, referring to his watch, found the evening to have so slipped away, that they were striking twelve.  As he put up his watch again, his eyes met those of his reflection in the chimney-glass.

“Why, it’s your birthday already,” he said, smiling.  “You are looking very well.  I wish you many happy returns of the day.”

He had never before bestowed that wish upon himself.  “By Jupiter!” he discovered, “it alters the whole case of running away from one’s birthday!  It’s a thing to explain to Phoebe.  Besides, here is quite a long story to tell her, that has sprung out of the road with no story.  I’ll go back, instead of going on.  I’ll go back by my friend Lamps’s Up X presently.”

He went back to Mugby Junction, and, in point of fact, he established himself at Mugby Junction.  It was the convenient place to live in, for brightening Phoebe’s life.  It was the convenient place to live in, for having her taught music by Beatrice.  It was the convenient place to live in, for occasionally borrowing Polly.  It was the convenient place to live in, for being joined at will to all sorts of agreeable places and persons.  So, he became settled there, and, his house standing in an elevated situation, it is noteworthy of him in conclusion, as Polly herself might (not irreverently) have put it: 

   “There was an Old Barbox who lived on a hill,
   And if he ain’t gone, he lives there still.”

Here follows the substance of what was seen, heard, or otherwise picked up, by the gentleman for Nowhere, in his careful study of the Junction.

CHAPTER III—­THE BOY AT MUGBY

I am the boy at Mugby.  That’s about what I am.

You don’t know what I mean?  What a pity!  But I think you do.  I think you must.  Look here.  I am the boy at what is called The Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, and what’s proudest boast is, that it never yet refreshed a mortal being.

Up in a corner of the Down Refreshment Room at Mugby Junction, in the height of twenty-seven cross draughts (I’ve often counted ’em while they brush the First-Class hair twenty-seven ways), behind the bottles, among the glasses, bounded on the nor’west by the beer, stood pretty far to the right of a metallic object that’s at times the tea-urn and at times the soup-tureen, according to the nature of the last twang imparted to its contents which are the same groundwork, fended off from the traveller by a barrier of stale sponge-cakes erected atop of the counter, and lastly exposed sideways to the glare of Our Missis’s eye—­you ask a Boy so sitiwated, next time you stop in a hurry at Mugby, for anything to drink; you take particular notice that he’ll try to seem not to hear you, that he’ll appear in a absent manner to survey the Line through a transparent medium composed of your head and body, and that he won’t serve you as long as you can possibly bear it.  That’s me.