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When some poor mangled plate-layer or a railway-porter crushed almost out of resemblance to humanity would be borne in and laid on an empty cot in the accident ward, this woman was at the bedside with a seemingly intuitive perception of what would best conduce to soothe and ease the poor shattered fellow; and she would wait on him "hand and foot" with an intensity of devotion far in excess of what mere duty, however conscientiously fulfilled, would have demanded of her.
A Queen out of the strongest tribe, that'll make them your blood-brothers, and that'll lie by your side and tell you all the people thinks about you and their own affairs. That's what I want. "'Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept at Mogul Serai when I was a plate-layer? says I. 'A fat lot o' good she was to me. She taught me the lingo and one or two other things; but what happened?
The plate-layer appeared in no wise unwilling to postpone for a few moments his tiring and chilly underground patrol; he put down his pick before answering. "Well, that's not surprising, is it? People who are rich enough to travel first-class always come by the express which gets to Brives at 2.50 A.M."
The head of Stephenson, as expressed in this noble work, is massive, characteristic, and faithful; and the attitude of the figure is simple yet manly and energetic. It stands on a pedestal, at the respective corners of which are sculptured the recumbent figures of a pitman, a mechanic, an engine-driver, and a plate-layer.
A man approached the cabin allotted to the plate-layer in charge of that section of the line in which the tunnel was included. "I suppose this is the train due at Verrières at 6.55?" he said carelessly. "Yes," the plate-layer answered, "but it's late, for the clock down there in the valley struck seven several minutes ago."
The next thing heard of him was when his dead body was discovered by a plate-layer named Mason, just outside Aldgate Station on the Underground system in London." "When?" "The body was found at six on Tuesday morning. It was lying wide of the metals upon the left hand of the track as one goes eastward, at a point close to the station, where the line emerges from the tunnel in which it runs.
"Look here," he said, "I will take a step or two forward as if I meant to run away; then you must put your hand on my shoulder roughly, and I will stumble; when I do, slip the bracelets on." From the mouth of the tunnel the plate-layer, the foreman and the navvies all followed with their eyes the unintelligible conversation passing between the gendarme and the tramp a hundred yards away.
As the match died out, a noise among the stones near the wall caused me hastily to strike another, just in time to see a large rat whisk into its hole. A miner, a plate-layer in fact, anyone whose avocations took them underground would have laughed to scorn these childish fears; but the situation was so new to me, and also I must confess that I am naturally of a nervous, imaginative turn of mind.
The foreman stopped abruptly; he had been examining the foot of the embankment, and was standing quite still, watching. The plate-layer followed his glance, and also stood fixed. After a few moments' silence the two men looked at each other and smiled.
"'Course, I'm not saying no, but I should like to see what sort of work it is they're doing here: it might not suit me; I shall still have time to get a couple of words with him," and with his eyes on the ground the tramp slowly walked along the embankment away from the plate-layer. The foreman met and passed him, and came up to the plate-layer at the mouth of the tunnel.
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