Many passengers put their heads to the window, and among the rest an old gentleman on whom I willingly dwell, for I am nearly done with him now, and (in the whole course of the present narrative) I am not in the least likely to meet another character so decent.  His name is immaterial, not so his habits.  He had passed his life wandering in a tweed suit on the continent of Europe; and years of Galignani’s Messenger having at length undermined his eyesight, he suddenly remembered the rivers of Assyria and came to London to consult an oculist.  From the oculist to the dentist, and from both to the physician, the step appears inevitable; presently he was in the hands of Sir Faraday, robed in ventilating cloth and sent to Bournemouth; and to that domineering baronet (who was his only friend upon his native soil) he was now returning to report.  The case of these tweedsuited wanderers is unique.  We have all seen them entering the table d’hote (at Spezzia, or Grdtz, or Venice) with a genteel melancholy and a faint appearance of having been to India and not succeeded.  In the offices of many hundred hotels they are known by name; and yet, if the whole of this wandering cohort were to disappear tomorrow, their absence would be wholly unremarked.  How much more, if only one—­say this one in the ventilating cloth—­should vanish!  He had paid his bills at Bournemouth; his worldly effects were all in the van in two portmanteaux, and these after the proper interval would be sold as unclaimed baggage to a Jew; Sir Faraday’s butler would be a half-crown poorer at the year’s end, and the hotelkeepers of Europe about the same date would be mourning a small but quite observable decline in profits.  And that would be literally all.  Perhaps the old gentleman thought something of the sort, for he looked melancholy enough as he pulled his bare, grey head back into the carriage, and the train smoked under the bridge, and forth, with ever quickening speed, across the mingled heaths and woods of the New Forest.

Not many hundred yards beyond Browndean, however, a sudden jarring of brakes set everybody’s teeth on edge, and there was a brutal stoppage.  Morris Finsbury was aware of a confused uproar of voices, and sprang to the window.  Women were screaming, men were tumbling from the windows on the track, the guard was crying to them to stay where they were; at the same time the train began to gather way and move very slowly backward toward Browndean; and the next moment—­, all these various sounds were blotted out in the apocalyptic whistle and the thundering onslaught of the down express.

The actual collision Morris did not hear.  Perhaps he fainted.  He had a wild dream of having seen the carriage double up and fall to pieces like a pantomime trick; and sure enough, when he came to himself, he was lying on the bare earth and under the open sky.  His head ached savagely; he carried his hand to his brow, and was not surprised to see it red with blood.  The air was filled with an intolerable, throbbing roar, which he expected to find die away with the return of consciousness; and instead of that it seemed but to swell the louder and to pierce the more cruelly through his ears.  It was a raging, bellowing thunder, like a boiler-riveting factory.