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.