“You remember me, Young Jackson?”

“What do I remember if not you?  You are my first remembrance.  It was you who told me that was my name.  It was you who told me that on every twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a birthday.  I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!”

“What am I like, Young Jackson?”

“You are like a blight all through the year to me.  You hard-lined, thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on.  You are like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you make me abhor them.”

“You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?” In another voice from another quarter.

“Most gratefully, sir.  You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition in my life.  When I attended your course, I believed that I should come to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy ­even though I was still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day.  As I had done every, every, every day, through my school-time and from my earliest recollection.”

“What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?”

“You are like a Superior Being to me.  You are like Nature beginning to reveal herself to me.  I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them.”

“You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?” In a grating voice from quite another quarter.

“Too well.  You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed.  You showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers.  (When they were, if they ever were, is unknown to me; there was nothing of them but the name when I bent to the oar.) You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told me afterwards, at intervals of years, when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became the Firm.  I know no more of it, or of myself.”

“What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?”

“You are like my father, I sometimes think.  You are hard enough and cold enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son.  I see your scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but you, too, wear a wax mask to your death.  You never by a chance remove it ­it never by a chance falls off ­and I know no more of you.”

Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight.  And as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire:  so he now looked in the sun-light, an ashier grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.

The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of the Public Notary and bill-broking tree.  It had gained for itself a griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation had stuck to it and to him.  As he had imperceptibly come into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard Street, on whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was never to be taken without his attested bond, whom all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against.  This character had come upon him through no act of his own.  It was as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him.  The discovery ­aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the deceit of the only friend he had ever made:  who eloped from him to be married together ­the discovery, so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had begun.  He shrank, abashed, within the form of Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more.

But he did at last effect one great release in his condition.  He broke the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley.  He prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it.  With enough to live on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliterated the firm of Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-Office Directory and the face of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus.

“For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up,” he explained to Mugby High Street, through the Inn window, “and that name at least was real once.  Whereas, Young Jackson! ­Not to mention its being a sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson.”

He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along on the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day’s dinner in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace.

“There’s Lamps!” said Barbox Brothers.  “And by the bye ­”

Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs.

“Bedside?” said Barbox Brothers testily.  “Sings them at the bedside?  Why at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk?  Does, I shouldn’t wonder.  But it’s no business of mine.  Let me see.  Mugby Junction, Mugby Junction.  Where shall I go next?  As it came into my head last night when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I can go anywhere from here.  Where shall I go?  I’ll go and look at the Junction by daylight.  There’s no hurry, and I may like the look of one Line better than another.”

But there were so many Lines.  Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that spun iron.  And then so many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, so crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them.  And then some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant barrier, or turned off into a workshop.  And then others, like intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued round and came back again.  And then others were so chock-full of trucks of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, others were so gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled objects like immense iron cotton-reels:  while others were so bright and clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end to the bewilderment.

Barbox Brothers stood puzzled on the bridge, passing his right hand across the lines on his forehead, which multiplied while he looked down, as if the railway Lines were getting themselves photographed on that sensitive plate.  Then was heard a distant ringing of bells and blowing of whistles.  Then, puppet-looking heads of men popped out of boxes in perspective, and popped in again.  Then, prodigious wooden razors, set up on end, began shaving the atmosphere.  Then, several locomotive engines in several directions began to scream and be agitated.  Then, along one avenue a train came in.  Then, along another two trains appeared that didn’t come in, but stopped without.  Then, bits of trains broke off.  Then, a struggling horse became involved with them.  Then, the locomotives shared the bits of trains, and ran away with the whole.

“I have not made my next move much clearer by this.  No hurry.  No need to make up my mind to-day, or to-morrow, nor yet the day after.  I’ll take a walk.”

It fell out somehow (perhaps he meant it should) that the walk tended to the platform at which he had alighted, and to Lamps’s room.  But Lamps was not in his room.  A pair of velveteen shoulders were adapting themselves to one of the impressions on the wall by Lamps’s fireplace, but otherwise the room was void.  In passing back to get out of the station again, he learnt the cause of this vacancy, by catching sight of Lamps on the opposite line of railway, skipping along the top of a train, from carriage to carriage, and catching lighted namesakes thrown up to him by a coadjutor.

“He is busy.  He has not much time for composing or singing Comic Songs this morning, I take it.”

The direction he pursued now was into the country, keeping very near to the side of one great Line of railway, and within easy view of others.  “I have half a mind,"’ he said, glancing around, “to settle the question from this point, by saying, ’I’ll take this set of rails, or that, or t’other, and stick to it.’  They separate themselves from the confusion, out here, and go their ways.”

Ascending a gentle hill of some extent, he came to a few cottages.  There, looking about him as a very reserved man might who had never looked about him in his life before, he saw some six or eight young children come merrily trooping and whooping from one of the cottages, and disperse.  But not until they had all turned at the little garden-gate, and kissed their hands to a face at the upper window:  a low window enough, although the upper, for the cottage had but a story of one room above the ground.

Now, that the children should do this was nothing; but that they should do this to a face lying on the sill of the open window, turned towards them in a horizontal position, and apparently only a face, was something noticeable.  He looked up at the window again.  Could only see a very fragile, though a very bright face, lying on one cheek on the window-sill.  The delicate smiling face of a girl or woman.  Framed in long bright brown hair, round which was tied a light blue band or fillet, passing under the chin.

He walked on, turned back, passed the window again, shyly glanced up again.  No change.  He struck off by a winding branch-road at the top of the hill ­which he must otherwise have descended ­kept the cottages in view, worked his way round at a distance so as to come out once more into the main road, and be obliged to pass the cottages again.  The face still lay on the window-sill, but not so much inclined towards him.  And now there were a pair of delicate hands too.  They had the action of performing on some musical instrument, and yet it produced no sound that reached his ears.

“Mugby Junction must be the maddest place in England,” said Barbox Brothers, pursuing his way down the hill.  “The first thing I find here is a Railway Porter who composes comic songs to sing at his bedside.  The second thing I find here is a face, and a pair of hands playing a musical instrument that don’t play!”

The day was a fine bright day in the early beginning of November, the air was clear and inspiriting, and the landscape was rich in beautiful colours.  The prevailing colours in the court off Lombard Street, London city, had been few and sombre.  Sometimes, when the weather elsewhere was very bright indeed, the dwellers in those tents enjoyed a pepper-and-salt-coloured day or two, but their atmosphere’s usual wear was slate or snuff coloured.

He relished his walk so well that he repeated it next day.  He was a little earlier at the cottage than on the day before, and he could hear the children upstairs singing to a regular measure, and clapping out the time with their hands.

“Still, there is no sound of any musical instrument,” he said, listening at the corner, “and yet I saw the performing hands again as I came by.  What are the children singing?  Why, good Lord, they can never be singing the multiplication table?”

They were, though, and with infinite enjoyment.  The mysterious face had a voice attached to it, which occasionally led or set the children right.  Its musical cheerfulness was delightful.  The measure at length stopped, and was succeeded by a murmuring of young voices, and then by a short song which he made out to be about the current month of the year, and about what work it yielded to the labourers in the fields and farmyards.  Then there was a stir of little feet, and the children came trooping and whooping out, as on the previous day.  And again, as on the previous day, they all turned at the garden-gate, and kissed their hands ­evidently to the face on the window-sill, though Barbox Brothers from his retired post of disadvantage at the corner could not see it.

But, as the children dispersed, he cut off one small straggler ­a brown-faced boy with flaxen hair ­and said to him: 

“Come here, little one.  Tell me, whose house is that?”

The child, with one swarthy arm held up across his eyes, half in shyness, and half ready for defence, said from behind the inside of his elbow: 

“Phoebe’s.”

“And who,” said Barbox Brothers, quite as much embarrassed by his part in the dialogue as the child could possibly be by his, “is Phoebe?”

To which the child made answer:  “Why, Phoebe, of course.”

The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, and had taken his moral measure.  He lowered his guard, and rather assumed a tone with him:  as having discovered him to be an unaccustomed person in the art of polite conversation.

“Phoebe,” said the child, “can’t be anybobby else but Phoebe.  Can she?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Well,” returned the child, “then why did you ask me?”

Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up a new position.

“What do you do there?  Up there in that room where the open window is.  What do you do there?”

“Cool,” said the child.

“Eh?”

“Co-o-ol,” the child repeated in a louder voice, lengthening out the word with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say:  “What’s the use of your having grown up, if you’re such a donkey as not to understand me?”

“Ah!  School, school,” said Barbox Brothers.  “Yes, yes, yes.  And Phoebe teaches you?”

The child nodded.

“Good boy.”

“Tound it out, have you?” said the child.

“Yes, I have found it out.  What would you do with twopence, if I gave it you?”

“Pend it.”

The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg to stand upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness, and withdrew in a state of humiliation.

But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage, he acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod, not a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffident compromise between or struggle with all three.  The eyes in the face seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said:  “Good-day to you, sir.”

“I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction,” said Barbox Brothers with much gravity, after once more stopping on his return road to look at the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly.  “I can’t make up my mind yet which iron road to take.  In fact, I must get a little accustomed to the Junction before I can decide.”

So, he announced at the Inn that he was “going to stay on for the present,” and improved his acquaintance with the Junction that night, and again next morning, and again next night and morning:  going down to the station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings and outgoings of the trains.  At first, he often put his head into Lamps’s little room, but he never found Lamps there.  A pair or two of velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire, sometimes in connection with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and meat; but the answer to his inquiry, “Where’s Lamps?” was, either that he was “t’other side the line,” or, that it was his off-time, or (in the latter case) his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not his Lamps.  However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now, but he bore the disappointment.  Nor did he so wholly devote himself to his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction as to neglect exercise.  On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same walk.  But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was never open.