Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880, page 219 by Various Authors
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ings of words without sense. Thank Heaven, I am off! I am actually going to sleep. Not yet!
Down the street comes a man with an accordion. He is playing "Annie Laurie." Every now and then he strikes a wrong note. Excruciating agony! Did he render it correctly it might blend with a romantic dream, but when he insists on flatting persistently, as for bonnie Annie Laurie he offers to lay him down and die, who is to bear it? And why does he not consummate the proffered sacrifice by dying at once? I would cheerfully bury him. He passes slowly, lingeringly, seeming to pause outside of my window, as if my casement enshrined that form like the snowdrift and that throat like the swan's. But, although he vanishes finally, the street has become alive. Two men pass in deeply-interesting conversation, one of them assuring the other that he has not done "a stroke's work" in two years. He is maudlin, of course. "A stroke's work"? And as if any man could expect to find work and to do it after keeping such hours as these!
And now comes "the whistler." I had been expecting him. He is to-night whistling airs from Pinafore. The Pirates, thank Heaven! furnishes him no airs. He whistles--let me confess, reluctant although I am to do it--he whistles to perfection. There is nothing experimental, nothing tentative, in his notes, which come clear, sharp, in perfect time and tune.
The clock strikes two. It is the voice of doom, for presently the 2.19 freight-train will thunder slowly through our end of the town. It renders my case utterly hopeless. One might as well expect to sleep in momentary expectation of the Juggernaut. I know its every sound: I can feel the bridge at ---- Junction, five miles away, tremble under it. I listen and wait, every nerve on edge. A mile and a half the other side of our station the engine will first snort, then begin a series of shrieks--shrieks suggestive of warning, imminent danger, supreme peril, the climax of a tragical catastrophe. For at least five minutes