"I wonder if he'll let you come." "Where ?" whispered Taffy.
"Up to Plymouth--to the Pantomime." "What's that ?" "Oh--clowns, and girls dressed up like boys, and policemen on slides, and that sort of thing." Taffy sat bewildered.

He vaguely remembered Plymouth as a mass of roofs seen from the train, as it drew up for a minute or two on a high bridge.

Someone in the railway carriage had talked of an engine called _Brutus_, which (it appeared) had lately run away and crashed into the cloak-room at the end of the platform.

He still thought of railway engines as big, blundering animals, with wills of their own, and of Plymouth as a town rendered insecure by their vagaries; but the idea that its roofs covered girls dressed up like boys and policemen on slides was new to him, and pleasant on the whole, though daunting.
"Will you give my thanks to Sir Harry," said Mr.Raymond, after lessons, "and tell him that Taffy may go." So on New Year's Day Taffy found himself in Plymouth.

It was an experience which he could never fit into his life except as a gaudy interlude; for when he awoke and looked back upon it, he was no longer the boy who had climbed up beside Sir Harry and behind Sir Harry's restless pair of bays.