Gloria Victis! by Ossip Schubin

Pernik is the junction of several railway lines, trains coming from two separate watering-places connect here with trains from Prague, and set free the travellers who have tried the virtue of the various baths. Ladies with faded faces, and bouquets of faded flowers, were wandering about looking for hand-bags gone astray or for waiting-maids, men were busily munching, glad to forget over their first sandwich, the dietetic limitations to which they had been forced to submit while undergoing a course of the baths; locomotives were hissing and puffing like monsters out of breath after a race; the sunshine glittered on the flat roofs of the railway-carriages, the whole atmosphere reeked with coal-dust, and hot iron; there was the usual bustle of hand-cars piled with luggage pushed along the rails, of the shifting of cars on the tracks, and of vendors of fresh water and Pernik beer, with newspaper boys loudly extolling their various wares.

Escorted by the obsequious conductor, and followed by the servants, the three conservatives were making their way through the hurly-burly when they nearly ran against a young man, who, with his hands in the pockets of his rough coat, was striding through the crowd, never turning to the right or the left, in a line as straight as that of the railway between St. Petersburg and Moscow.