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ON a morning sick as the day of doom / With the drizzling gray / Of an English May, / There were few in the railway waiting-room. / About its walls were framed and varnished / Pictures of liners, fly-blown, tarnished. / The table bore a Testament / For travellers' reading, if suchwise bent.
I read it on and on, / And, thronging the Gospel of Saint John, / Were figures-additions, multiplications- / By some one scrawled, with sundry emendations; / Not scoffingly designed, / But with an absent mind,- / Plainly a bagman's counts of cost, / What he had profited, what lost; / And whilst I wondered if there could have been / Any particle of a soul / In that poor man at all,