By The Railway Side

Work on the vocabular development. Pick out the word that does not belong to the group.
1. The man was shouting blasphemous ideas about different religions.

a. authentic b. nonsense c. distracting d. humiliating
2. The audience ignored the man’s clamor for change on social injustice.
a. yell b. cry c. scream d. silence
3. They were spoken by a man who had false ideas as to what is convincing in elocution.
a. delivery b. inarticulate c. expression d. utterance
4. The lawyer could not easily counterfeit his arguments.
a. simulate b. reverse c. imitate d. fabricate
5. The lady was wearing a bourgeouis dress just like any other woman in their locale.
a. traditional b. common c. original d. conservative
6. He can never forget the entreaties made which was agreed upon for quite some time.
a. answer b. petition c. request d. appeal
By Richard Nordquist
Updated on May 03, 2019
Though born in London, poet, suffragette, critic and essayist Alice Meynell (1847-1922) spent
most of her childhood in Italy, the setting for this short travel essay, "By the Railway Side."
Originally published in "The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays" (1893), "By the Railway Side"
contains a powerful vignette. In an article titled "The Railway Passenger; or, The Training of the
Eye", Ana Parejo Vadillo and John Plunkett interpret Meynell's brief descriptive narrative as "an
attempt to get rid of what one may call the "passenger's guilt" -- or "the transformation of
someone else's drama into a spectacle, and the guilt of the passenger as he or she takes the
position of the audience, not oblivious to the fact that what is happening is real but both unable
and unwilling to act on it" ("The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine
Ensemble," 2007).
How can your character affect others?
By the Railway Side

by Alice Meynell
My train drew near to the Via Reggio platform on a day between two of the
harvests of a hot September; the sea was burning blue, and there were a
sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun as his fires brooded
deeply over the serried, hardy, shabby, seaside ilex-woods. I had come out of
Tuscany and was on my way to the Genovesato: the steep country with its
profiles, bay by bay, of successive mountains grey with olive-trees, between the
flashes of the Mediterranean and the sky; the country through the which there
sounds the twanging Genoese language, a thin Italian mingled with a little
Arabic, more Portuguese, and much French.
I was regretful at leaving the elastic Tuscan speech, canorous in its vowels set in
emphatic L's and m's and the vigorous soft spring of the double consonants. But
as the train arrived its noises were drowned by a voice declaiming in the tongue I
was not to hear again for months--good Italian. The voice was so loud that one
looked for the audience: Whose ears was it seeking to reach by the violence done
to every syllable, and whose feelings would it touch by its insincerity? The tones
were insincere, but there was passion behind them; and most often passion acts
its own true character poorly, and consciously enough to make good judges think
it a mere counterfeit.
Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend
to be angry, so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form. Thus
even before the words were distinguishable it was manifest that they were spoken
by a man in serious trouble who had false ideas as to what is convincing
in elocution.
When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting blasphemies

from the broad chest of a middle-aged man--an Italian of the type that grows
stout and wears whiskers. The man was in bourgeois dress, and he stood with his
hat off in front of the small station building, shaking his thick fist at the sky. No
one was on the platform with him except the railway officials, who seemed in
doubt as to their duties in the matter, and two women.
Of one of these there was nothing to remark except her distress. She wept as she
stood at the door of the waiting-room. Like the second woman, she wore the
dress of the shopkeeping class throughout Europe, with the local black lace veil in
place of a bonnet over her hair. It is of the second woman--O unfortunate
creature!--that this record is made--a record without sequel, without
consequence; but there is nothing to be done in her regard except so to remember
her. And thus much I think I owe after having looked, from the midst of the
negative happiness that is given to so many for a space of years, at some minutes
of her despair. She was hanging on the man's arm in her entreaties that he would
stop the drama he was enacting. She had wept so hard that her face was
disfigured. Across her nose was the dark purple that comes with overpowering
fear. Haydon saw it on the face of a woman whose child had just been run over in
a London street.
I remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via Reggio, in her
intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs lifting it. She was afraid that
the man would throw himself under the train. She was afraid that he would be
damned for his blasphemies; and as to this her fear was mortal fear. It was
horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.
What would you feel if you were in that woman’s shoes?
Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the clamour. No one
had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror. But has any one
who saw it forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day it was a sensible
rather than a merely mental image.
Constantly a red blur rose before my eyes for a background, and against it
appeared the dwarf's head, lifted with sobs, under the provincial black lace veil.
And at night what emphasis it gained on the boundaries of sleep! Close to my
hotel there was a roofless theatre crammed with people, where they were giving
Offenbach. The operas of Offenbach still exist in Italy, and the little town was
placarded with announcements of La Bella Elena.
The peculiar vulgar rhythm of the music jigged audibly through half the hot
night, and the clapping of the town's-folk filled all its pauses. But the persistent
noise did but accompany, for me, the persistent vision of those three figures at
the Via Reggio station in the profound sunshine of the day.
Source:
Nordquist, Richard. "By the Railway Side, by Alice Meynell." ThoughtCo, Aug. 28, 2020,
thoughtco.com/by-the-railway-side-alice-meynell-1690002.
Answer the following questions:

1.What is implied by these lines found in the first paragraph – “the sea was burning blue and there were
sombreness and a gravity in the very excesses of the sun?”
2.How is the setting described?
3.Why was the man speaking at the top of his voice in the station? What was his purpose?
4.How do you think people reacted to him? What do they feel and why?
5.Who do you think was the woman trying to stop the man from talking nonsense?
6.Based on the dialogue, actions, and attitude of the man, what can you say about his character?
7.If that man was a known person, for example, he is a politician, a priest, or a teacher, do you think
people would listen to him? Why?
8.What would make a person be more credible to be given such attention?9.How does the author
describe her journey in the essay? What emotions are evident?
10.If you were one of the passengers on the train who saw the incident, how would you react? Explain
your answer.
11.What specific literary devices were used by the author to make the story more interesting?

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Work on the vocabular development. Pick out the word that does not belong to the group.

1. The man was shouting blasphemous ideas about different religions.

How can your character affect others?

By the Railway Side

When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting blasphemies

Answer the following questions:

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