IN THE STATE OF DENMARK 85 



transferred his burden to a fat man, who had been 

 preparing one side of our carriage as a bed, and the 

 invahd was placed on it. She seemed crippled or 

 mysteriously ill, and lay moaning and weeping in 

 her place. Two very stout, dirty, young German 

 ladies pressed into the carriage after her, and, also 

 weeping, covered her with rugs and shawls of evil 

 odour. The young man in the frock-coat said farewell 

 to her and to his father, hysterically, with embraces 

 and inarticulate German endearments ; so, with the 

 lesser fervour of an English daughter-in-law, did his 

 wife. It was intensely painful, and the other occupants 

 of the carriage looked out of the window, and longed 

 for the train to start. Wien it did, the invalid drew 

 her shawl over her corpse-like face and wept yet more 

 pitiably ; her daughters held her hands, they took off 

 her boots, her stockings, they opened a band-box, and 

 from among many details of the toilet they took cold 

 sausages, cheese, pastry, and plums, and prepared a 

 meal. The invalid partook of all of these and was 

 comforted. They all partook, and the fellow-travellers 

 averted their eyes, opened the ventilators, and endured 

 till Harwich. Possibly the invahd and her party got 

 no farther that night; certainly they did not enter 

 the train that was waiting at the little station in the 

 fresh, brilliant morning, when we stepped ashore at 

 the Hook of Holland landing-stage. It was as well. 

 The early Dutch sunshine was very searching, so was 

 the breeze that was crisping the blue water of the 

 dykes, and that slight inward misgiving that follows 

 even a calm night on the steamer might have turned 

 to serious qualm had the assiduous daughters with 

 the greasy locks once more opened the bandbox in 

 our proximity. 



The corridor-train ghdes in a few hours across the 

 flatness of Holland, that flatness whose absolute 



