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.