den, and Loughborough-park. We were in dismay, when Pinniger was struck with a thought—
"Why couldn't you precipitate a special train, Bob?" he said to Moozeby.
Poor Moozeby looked fagged out, and said, "Fact is, I don't feel over fresh after precipitating all those other things. It's a bit of a strain; and a train's a big thing to undertake late in the day—the engine alone will take a lot out of me; but I'll do my best."
Accordingly, poor Moozeby, after a sip of brandy, went and fixed his eyes steadily on the line, while we all stood round, staring eagerly at the same point. The station-master, thinking something must be wrong, came up and asked if we had lost anything.
"Sh!" whispered Pinniger hoarsely; "don't distract his attention—you'll spoil it."
So the station-master and the porters, and young W. H. Smith & Sons silently joined the group, and stared at the line too. A quarter of an hour elapsed, and then a grey vapour began to gather on the line, uncertainly; for fully another twenty minutes it wavered and varied in density, and then the station-master began to grow anxious.
"Moozeby fixed his eyes steadily on the line."
"Beg pardon—don't want to spoil the experiment, whatever it may be," he whispered. "But it won't do to interfere with the line in any way—it's against all rules."
It became obvious that we must let the station-master into it; to attempt to work a thing on so large a scale without taking him into the affair seemed positively rude; besides which, he might be able to assist Moozeby with hints as to the proper construction of a train. So we explained the matter to him.
The station-master shook his head decisively, and said it was against rules for strangers to place trains on the line; it was obviously to the common danger, particularly as the up express was due in twelve minutes.
This was serious; we advised Moozeby to run his nebula on to a siding out of danger, and go on with it there—if we could persuade the station-master to sanction it.
But Moozeby was very tired, and got flurried over it; he found that the half-solid train would not move, the engine not yet having arrived at a working condition, so he hastily attempted to precipitate a horse to drag it into the siding; but the horse behaved in a foolish manner, too, and finally took form with only three legs, one of them being filmy. Our nervousness and excitement grew intense—the express was signalled as having passed a point three miles away, and would be upon us almost immediately; in our despair we jumped down on the line, and put our shoulders to such half-solid portions of Moozeby's train as we could find—but our exertions only made a jumbled mass of it, owing to the nebulous parts giving way; the rumble of the approaching express grew momentarily louder; the station-master and the porters and young W. H. Smith shrieked to us to come off the line; we scrambled madly on to the platform, yelling to Moozeby to dissolve his train as sharp as he could; Moozeby gasped and made one mighty effort; the express came thundering through the arch a hundred yards away; the station-master and porters and young Smith were nearly mad, and tried frantically to poke away the lumps of Moozeby's train with some poles. The express dashed by, scattering the pieces of train in all directions, and whirled away out of sight.
Lumps of the scattered train were falling about us in every direction, some of them upon our heads; but they were so light that an umbrella easily kept them off: and we breathed again, for the express had escaped undamaged.
