craft were sometimes indebted for suggestion.
The invasion of an eccentric-looking individual—probably
an innocent tradesman into a railway carriage had
given the hint for “A Night with a Lunatic;”
a nervously excited and belated passenger had once
unconsciously sat for an escaped forger; the picking
up of a forgotten novel in the rack, with passages
marked in pencil, had afforded the plot of a love
story; or the germ of a romance had been found in an
obscure news paragraph which, under less listless
moments, would have passed unread. On the other
hand, he recalled these inconvenient and inconsistent
moments from which the so-called “inspiration”
sprang, the utter incongruity of time and place in
some brilliant conception, and wondered if sheer vacuity
of mind were really so favorable.
Going back to his magazine again, he began to get
mildly interested in a story. Turning the page,
however, he was confronted by a pictorial advertising
leaflet inserted between the pages, yet so artistic
in character that it might have been easily mistaken
for an illustration of the story he was reading, and
perhaps was not more remote or obscure in reference
than many he had known. But the next moment he
recognized with despair that it was only a smaller
copy of one he had seen on the hoarding at the last
station. He threw the leaflet aside, but the flavor
of the story was gone. The peerless detergent
of the advertisement had erased it from the tablets
of his memory. He leaned back in his seat again,
and lazily watched the flying suburbs. Here were
the usual promising open spaces and patches of green,
quickly succeeded again by solid blocks of houses
whose rear windows gave directly upon the line, yet
seldom showed an inquisitive face—even of
a wondering child. It was a strange revelation
of the depressing effects of familiarity. Expresses
might thunder by, goods trains drag their slow length
along, shunting trains pipe all day beneath their
windows, but the tenants heeded them not. Here,
too, was the junction, with its labyrinthine interlacing
of tracks that dazed the tired brain; the overburdened
telegraph posts, that looked as if they really could
not stand another wire; the long lines of empty, homeless,
and deserted trains in sidings that had seen better
days; the idle trains, with staring vacant windows,
which were eventually seized by a pert engine hissing,
“Come along, will you?” and departed with
a discontented grunt from every individual carriage
coupling; the racing trains, that suddenly appeared
parallel with one’s carriage windows, begot
false hopes of a challenge of speed, and then, without
warning, drew contemptuously and, superciliously away;
the swift eclipse of everything in a tunneled bridge;
the long, slithering passage of an “up”
express, and then the flash of a station, incoherent
and unintelligible with pictorial advertisements again.
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