A loop-line train was waiting, and he got into it, put the cheese on the rack in a corner, and the coffin next to it, assured himself that he had not mislaid his return ticket, and sat down under his baggage.  It was the slackest time of day, and, as the train started at Longshaw, there were very few passengers.  He had the compartment to himself.

He was just giving way to one of those moods of vague and pleasant meditation which are perhaps the chief joy of such a temperament, when he suddenly sprang up as if in fear.  And fear had in fact seized him.  Suppose he forgot those belongings on the rack?  Suppose, sublimely careless, he descended from the train and left them there?  What a calamity!  And similar misadventures had happened to him before.  It was the cheese that disquieted him.  No one would be sufficiently unprincipled to steal the coffin, and he would ultimately recover it at the lost luggage office, babies’ coffins not abounding on the North Staffordshire Railway.  But the cheese!  He would never see the cheese again!  No integrity would be able to withstand the blandishments of that cheese.  Moreover, his wife would be saddened.  And for her he had a sincere and profound affection.

His act of precaution was to lift the coffin down from the rack, and place it on the seat beside him, and then to put the parcel of cheese on the coffin.  He surveyed the cheese on the coffin; he surveyed it with the critical and experienced eye of an undertaker, and he decided that, if anyone else got into the carriage, it would not look quite decent, quite becoming—­in a word, quite nice.  A coffin is a coffin, and people’s feelings have to be considered.

So he whipped off the lid of the coffin, stuck the cheese inside, and popped the lid on again.  And he kept his hand on the coffin that he might not forget it.  When the train halted at Knype, Mr Till was glad that he had put the cheese inside, for another passenger got into the compartment.  And it was a clergyman.  He recognized the clergyman, though the clergyman did not recognize him.  It was the Reverend Claud ffolliott, famous throughout the Five Towns as the man who begins his name with a small letter, doesn’t smoke, of course doesn’t drink, but goes to football matches, has an average of eighteen at cricket, and makes a very pretty show with the gloves, in spite of his thirty-eight years; celibate, very High, very natty and learned about vestments, terrific at sick couches and funerals.  Mr Till inwardly trembled to think what the Reverend Claud ffolliott might have said had he seen the cheese reposing in the coffin, though the coffin was empty.