' But with
mulish stubbornness I thought: 'They wished to go to London'; and on I
raged, not wildly exhilarated, so far as I can remember, nor lunatic,
but feeling the dull glow of a wicked and morose Unreason urge in my
bosom, while I stoked all blackened at the fire, or saw the vague mass
of dead horse or cow, running trees and fields, and dark homestead and
deep-slumbering farm, flit ghostly athwart the murky air, as the
half-blind saw 'men like trees walking.'
Long, however, it did not last: I could not have been twenty miles from
Dover when, on a long reach of straight lines, I made out before me a
tarpaulined mass opposite a signal-point: and at once callousness
changed to terror within me. But even as I plied the brake, I felt that
it was too late: I rushed to the gangway to make a wild leap down an
embankment to the right, but was thrown backward by a quick series of
rough bumps, caused by eight or ten cattle which lay there across the
lines: and when I picked myself up, and leapt, some seconds before the
impact, the speed must have considerably slackened, for I received no
fracture, but lay in semi-coma in a patch of yellow-flowered whin on
level ground, and was even conscious of a fire on the lines forty yards
away, and, all the night, of vague thunder sounding from somewhere.
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