Again, as the train drew out of the station, the old gentleman pulled out of his pocket his great shining watch; and for the fifth, or, as it seemed to me, the five-hundredth time, he said (we were in the carriage alone together) 'To the minute, to the very minute! It's a marvellous thing, the Railway; a wonderful age!'

Now I had been long annoyed by the old gentleman's smiling face, platitudes, and piles of newspapers; I had no love for the Age, and an impulse came on me to denounce it.

'Allow me to tell you,' I said, 'that I consider it a wretched, an ignoble age. Where's the greatness of life? Where's dignity, leisure, stateliness; where's Art and Eloquence? Where are your great scholars, statesmen? Let me ask you, sir,' I cried glaring at him, 'where's your Gibbon, your Burke or Chatham?'