(_A Remonstrance at a Railway Station_)
The tympanum! The tympanum!
Oh! who will save the aural drum
By softening to some gentler squeak
The whistle's shrill _staccato_ shriek?
Oh! Engine-driver, did you know
How your blast smites one like a blow,
An inward shock, a racking strain,
A knife-like thrust of poignant pain,
Whilst groping through the tunnel murk
You would not with that fiendish jerk
Let out that _sudden_ blast of steam
Whose screaming almost makes _us_ scream
Thy whistle weird perchance may be
A sad and sore necessity,
But cannot Law and sense combine
To--well, in short to draw the line?--
Across the open let it shrill
From moor to moor, from hill to hill,
But in the tunnel's crypt-like gloom,
The station's cramped reverberant room,
A gentler, _graduated_ blast!
_Do_ let it loose, whilst dashing past,
So shall it spare us many a pang;
That dread explosive bursting "bang"
Which nearly splits the aural drum,
The poor long-suffering tympanum!
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[Illustration: "THE BLOCK SYSTEM"
_Affable Old Lady (to ticket clerk--morning express just due)._ "No, I'm
not going up this morning, but one of your penny time-tables, if you
please; and can you tell me"--(_Shouts from the crowd_, "Now then,
mum!")--"if the 10.45 stops at Dribblethorp Junction, and if Shandry's
'bus meets the trains, which it always does on market days, I know,
'cause my married sister's cousin, as is a farmer, generally goes by it.
But if it don't come o' Toosday as well as Wednesday, I shall have to
get out at Shuntbury and take a fly, which runs into money, you know,
when you're by yourself like. If you'll be good enough to look out the
trains--and change for half a sovereign, if you please. Oh no, I'm in no
hurry, as I ain't a goin' till next week. Fine morn----"
[_Bell rings. Position stormed._]
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