‘On the Track’, from Henry Dunbar: The Story of an Outcast, Three Vols. (London: J. Maxwell, 1866), III, pp. 187–201

The railway journey between Shorncliffe and Derby was by no means the most pleasant expedition for a cold spring night, with the darkness lying like a black shroud on the flat fields, and a melancholy wind howling over those desolate regions, across which all night-trains seem to wend their way. I think that flat and darksome land which we look upon out of the window of a railway carriage in the dead of the night must be a weird district, conjured into existence by the potent magic of an enchanter’s wand,—a dreary desert transported out of Central Africa, to make the night-season hideous, and to vanish at cock-crow.