Taking into account the physical curtailments of Overdale's companions, the trio consisted of about two men and a half.
Dennis now proposed that they should go on with the song, he volunteering to sing the verses, and requesting the reinforcements to show their strength when he said, "Chorius " the mention of music excited Overdale's harmonic devil again, and he was obliged to twist his neckerchief until he was black in the face, to choke down an embryo, "tooral," which ran to his lips before the cue came, and seemed to insist upon an immediate and stormy exit; by dint of the most suffocating exertions he succeeded in keeping back the musical torrent until the end of the verse, when it broke forth with a vengeance.
And then Wagstaff struck in, and Dennis took a long breath, and he struck in; and they waked up a couple of children, and they struck in; and Dennis put his wooden leg on the tail of a dog, and he struck in; and the locomotive put on the final touch, by shrieking with a frightful yell, as if it had boiled down into one, the squalls of eleven hundred freshly-spanked babies.
And they kept on, Dennis singing, in a masterly manner, the historical part; the charms of Dinah the barbarity of the cruel parient, the despair of Vilikins, the death and burial of the unfortunate "lovyers," their subsequent ghastly reappearance to the cruel parient, and his final remorse, had all been related; the "chorus of tender maidens" had been pathetically sung by the musical trio; the "chorus of cruel and unnatural parients," had been indignantly disposed of; the "chorus of pisoned young women," had been spasmodically executed: the "chorus of agonized young men, with an awful pain in the stummack," had been convulsively performed; the "chorus of cold corpuses," had been sepulchrally consummated; and the musical enthusiasts were laying out their most lugubrious strength on the "concluding dismal chorus of gloomy apparitions," when the concert was interrupted by the train running off the track and pitching a part of the passengers into a sand-bank on the right, throwing the remainder into frog-pond on the left, and gently depositing the engineer on a brush heap, where he was afterwards discovered with the bell-rope in his hand, and his legs covered up by the smoke-pipe.
It was soon ascertained that no very serious damage was done, beyond the demolition of the engine, which had left the rail without cause or provocation, and was now lying by the side of the road with its head in the mud, wrong end to, bottom side up, roasting itself brown, steaming itself yellow, and smoking itself black, like an insane cooking-stove
turned out-doors for misbehavior.
Overdale got out of the sand without assistance, and, save a black eye, and a peck or two of sand and gravel in his hair, was none the worse for the accident. Wagstaff crawled out of the frog pond, looking as dripping and juicy as a he-mermaid; while Dennis, though unconscious of any painful hurt, had sustained so serious a fracture of his wooden leg, that he found it necessary to splice it with an ironwood sapling before he could navigate.
It being discovered that the danger was over, and that there was nothing more to fear, the ladies, as in duty bound, began to faint; one old lady fainted, and fell near the engine; happening, however, to sit down in a puddle of hot water, she got up quicker than she went down; young lady, rather pretty, fainted and fell into the arms of four or five gentlemen who were waiting to receive her; another young lady fainted, and didn't fall into anybody's arms, being cross-eyed and having a wart on her nose; maiden lady, ancient and fat, got near a good-looking man with a big moustache, and giving notice of her intention by a premonitory squall, shut her eyes, and fell towards moustache; she had better, however, have kept her eyes open, for moustache, seeing her coming, and making a hasty estimate of her probable weight, stepped aside, and the gentle creature landed in a clump of Canada thistles, whence she speedily recovered herself, and looked fiery indignation at moustache, who bore it like a martyr; young lady in pantalets and curls tried it, but, being inexperienced, and not having taken the precaution to pick out a soft place to fall, in case there didn't anybody catch her, she bumped her head on a stone, and got up with a black eye; jealous married lady, seeing her husband endeavoring to resuscitate a plump-looking miss, immediately extemporized a faint herself, and fell directly across the young miss aforesaid, contriving as she descended, to break her husband's spectacles by a malicious dig with her elbow; in fact the ladies all fainted at least once apiece, and those who received the most attention had an extra spasm or two before their final recovery, while the vicious old maids whom nobody cared for, invariably fell near the best-looking girls, and went into furious convulsions, so that they could kick them in the tender places without its being suspected that their intentions were not honorable.